Best-ever NPRA!
Its’ time again for the annual NPRA Technology Forum.
The Advanced Process Control sessions are being held today – and PAS is the only APC vendor whose technology is represented by the customer papers!!
And the central theme to both customer papers is the elimination of step testing for APC implementation.
The PAS Star/Galaxy technology set is unique in the industry as it delivers model-based predictive control without any step testing. This saves countless hours of fiddling with the plant and eroding profits.
The papers were well received, but the traditionalists in the audience were up in arms – presumably afraid for their jobs…
That being said, the “old” way for doing APC projects has evolved. Now, instead of 20 days of step testing on a 24x7 basis, they’ve got it down to maybe 5-10 days of testing, using fancy data reduction and analysis techniques that takes a PHD to use.
And everyone is winning with those improvements – but they are not enough.
I mean, why spend 5-10 days jerking around the plant at the expense of production rate and quality if you don’t need to. Who would do that?
And not only do the traditionalists need to jerk the plant around for 5-10 days, they need to apply their expert at the customers’ cost to interpret the results, and produce the dynamic models for the controller.
And this happens not only on first implementation, but also whenever those dynamic models need adjustment to match changes in feedstock, feed rate, operating mode, seasons, and who knows what else?
Which all means a lot of stepping and bumping of the plant.
Ugh.
The better way is to incrementally have the controller monitor its own performance and adjust its own (internal) models.
Adaptive Model Predictive Control as one of the speakers called it – is the better solution. And is exactly in line with the PAS vision and proven technology set.
Gladly, it now seems that the customers on the NPRA’s paper selection committee have “caught the vision” that we at PAS have been preaching for some years. So much so, that the only papers on APC at this year’s NPRA conference are about the PAS no-step-test technologies!
Now that’s what I call progress!
Haven’t heard about our no-step-testing approach? Quite possible, since we’ve done very little marketing and publication of our approach.
Even despite the fact that we’ve been out there doing this for years….
Want to get caught up? Then check out my prior postings on the topic:
APC III - First-Principles Advantage
By the way, don’t be embarrassed if you haven’t heard much about our no-step-test vision – in all honesty, our marketing to date in this area has been pretty subdued. L
But not for long… papers like this are going to help us revolutionize the industry.
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