Going Bolding at Emerson Exchange 2009

I’ve known Terry Blevins for years and if I was only half as smart as he is, I’d be happy. Terry was manning the Advanced Process Control booth at Emerson Exchange and he was demonstrating something he’s been working on for 3 years now – Online Batch Process Analytics.

So for the first time in a process automation system, there’s a tool to monitor the quality and predict the endpoint of a batch based on a PCA/PLS developed model. He implemented a really cool technique call Dynamic Time Warping (beam me up, Scotty) which is based on logic used in voice recognition software to remove the time variation in batch to batch runs in developing the models.

Through a presentation layer making use of Microsoft Silverlight, operations and engineering personnel can then monitor, via Internet Explorer, the progression of a batch in real time and not only identify deviations, but quickly determine if the variations will effect the overall batch quality based of critical quality parameters.

PCA and DeltaV

Emerson just held their annual Global User Exchange in Dallas, TX. The event is getting bigger every year, which means, unfortunately, it’s getting harder to find the gems of take-away information.

One of the outstanding presentations was a joint workshop between Emerson and Lubrizol on their work with Principle Components Analysis (PCA) in batch processes entitled “Coupling Process Control Systems and Process Analytics to Improve Batch Operations”.

Robert Wojewodka of Lubrizol gave the best non-technical analogy of PCA I’ve ever seen. If you were in attendance, be sure and take a look at the PowerPoint supplied at the conference. If you didn’t make it, find someone who did and get a copy.

The results will be presented next year on trials they have planned for this winter in France, so stay tuned.