Anshul Arora Measurement & Analytics Bangalore, India, anshul.arora@in.abb.com; David Lincoln Measurement & Analytics St. Neots, Great Britain, david.lincoln@gb.abb.com; Jacolize Goosen Measurement & Analytics Johannesburg, South Africa, Jacolize.Goosen@za.abb.com
Over the past decade, increasingly stringent environmental regulations have been implemented throughout the world. Although emission monitoring regulations vary, locally, nationally as well as internationally, regulators often require clients to continuously measure and control a battery of pollutants (gases, such as sulfur dioxide (SO₂) and carbon dioxide (CO₂) and particulates). To accomplish this, regulators have instituted demanding analyzer availability requirements →01. Enter ABB to provide customers with greater transparency and predictability for Continuous Emissions Monitoring (CEM). Launched in 2021, ABB’s Genix Datalyzer™ is ABB’s cloud-hosted data analytics platform for fleet-wide asset health monitoring →02.
Compliance challenges
Despite the environmental benefits that regulations bring to society, they pose critical challenges for industries, eg, cement, waste management and power generation, that must comply. First and foremost is cost: the cost associated with meeting compliance and the costs of non-compliance have never been higher than they are today. So, industries seek cost-effective solutions that are accurate and reliable yet meet strict compliance regulations and standards for quality assurance¹.
Even though gas analyzers provide real-time data that customers require for compliance, data availability alone is not sufficient for compliance. Advanced equipment requires skilled maintenance and service support staff to ensure regulatory compliance. Herein lie further industry challenges. Finding local skilled staff can be difficult; and those available are often overstretched. Staff might not be available around-the-clock in some localities; and, for some operations it may not even be possible to have on-site expertise at all. Any of these situations can result in non-compliance, additional costs and reduced performance.
ABB Ability™ Genix
With over 60 years of experience in emissions monitoring, ABB is able to provide their gas analyzer customers with cost-effective, emission-compliant, and sustainable emission monitoring solutions that are dependable and offer reliable performance along with safety. With the launch of ABB Ability™ Genix Analytics and AI Suite in 2020, ABB demonstrated their ability to marry their industrial and automation experience with digital innovation to help industries in their digital transformation [1] to reduce costs and increase performance. ABB can now automate and contextualize operational technology (OT), information technology (IT) and engineering technology (ET) data. With assets, such as gas analyzers, at its core, this powerful platform includes the collation of the massive data that each asset generates. Since customers rely on assets designed and delivered by ABB, eg, analyzers, ABB is ideally positioned to know how to extract, converge, contextualize and utilize data for prediction possibilities, and suggest improvements. With Datalyzer, ABB can now add another value-added digital service to their market leading Continuous Emissions Monitoring System (CEMS) offering.
Through analysis of emissions data and associated equipment, including sample handling systems, this new solution helps improve accuracy and availability while reducing personnel challenges; such as the need for local employee intervention and eliminating or reducing the need for personnel to operate these monitoring systems. Through an innovative service agreement delivered by service engineers, ABB has reinvented their business model and now offers customers ABB Measurement Care Agreements. With costs known, customers can now focus on business.
Conceptualization
Based on experience with hundreds of customers, ABB recognized six core dimensions that an emission monitoring solution must address: compliance, asset availability, asset quality and accuracy, resource availability, scheduled maintenance as well as safety and cybersecurity. These areas have been incorporated into ABB’s analyzer fleet monitoring solution.
Compliance is crucial as non-compliance with regulations has never been more expensive nor important than it is today, in terms of both fines and the threat of possible shutdown(s). Simply fulfilling the demands of increased regulations results in an increase in compliance costs; the round-the-clock monitoring of pollutant gases seven days per week without disruption is daunting indeed.
Asset availability is also key because the failure of a single part of an analyzer can cause cascaded damage to the entire system. Thus, end users need to ensure maximum analyzer up-time through regular monitoring of key parameters. For a holistic view of the system, one needs to gather the information from different sources. This added layer of complexity makes the monitoring process difficult.
Clients must also assure high asset quality and accuracy to fulfill emission monitoring regulations. There are disadvantages to utilizing preventive maintenance to do this. Because preventive maintenance is designed to keep the analyzer from failing, it is driven by a calendar – parts are replaced based on statistically determined lifetime averages. When parts wear out faster than expected, due to abnormal, particularly harsh conditions, or an undetected component issue, a fault occurs and troubleshooting follows →04. The quality of the analyzer is thus, diminished; and this ultimately affects the measurement accuracy of different components.
Another factor is resource availability: Employee retirements and departures erode the “institutional knowledge” available to companies. Staff fluctuations challenge a company’s ability to standardize maintenance practices across multiple sites. Further, traditional maintenance personnel do not have sufficient time to keep up with IT advances such as, cybersecurity, technical bulletins, etc.
Scheduled maintenance must also be addressed. Obviously, there are more and less convenient times for scheduled maintenance. If a major disruptive event is not pre-empted with the help of condition monitoring or predictive maintenance solutions, companies face having to perform maintenance at the least convenient times, eg, at night, and this can be problematic and costly.
Further, safety and cybersecurity is critical, including safety of the personnel, operating systems and data. Recently, data breaches in major companies and ransomware attacks demonstrate such threats, eg, Colonial pipeline [2].
Despite the knowledge that these previously discussed six dimensions affect the performance of an emissions monitoring solution in one or the other way, it would be difficult to achieve the right asset quality using current conventional industrial preventive maintenance solutions. Consequently, end users can tend to overreact to minor events; this leads to a reduction in efficiency and impacts service costs as well.
The result of such preventive maintenance is that costs and schedules become unpredictable. ABB strives to eliminate this unpredictability with Datalyzer.
From preventive to predictive with the cloud
The central problem with conventional maintenance solutions is that whenever an end user wants to troubleshoot an issue with the analyzer, they must access various points of contact (POC) to fetch all relevant data points eg, for process data derived from Distributed Control Systems (DCS), or for system diagnostics accessed from a condition monitoring report, etc. Not only is this process troublesome, it creates barriers to efficiency and productivity – no value is added. When assets create digital footprints and data points, companies can monitor their gas analyzer health and performance, process and safety in real-time. Only then can digital value-driver solutions be implemented.
By employing the Datalyzer cloud solution, customers can gather all the data points from the analyzer, relay them to the cloud and access the data in one location →05. Multiple analyzers are connected to an edge device (MicroPC) which sends out the data to the cloud. MicroPC acts as a virtual machine comprising CPM+ and Genix Edgebase as its two components. This allows for the contextual integration of OT data with IT data and ET data. Customers can then correlate the necessary variety of parameters live and pre-empt disruptions and major failures – predictive maintenance becomes a reality. By creating digital footprints and data in real time, value is created. ABB’s cloud solution with its seamless and instant connectivity, scalable computing power and associated lower costs, dismantles the existing barriers to value-added performance that hold industries such as waste management back.
Role-based access for more control
Because Datalyzer architecture is modular, a role-based access functionality is included →06; users can issue the right kind of access to the right team members. From an end user’s perspective, ABB has followed the UX principle of ‘progressive disclosure’ ie, the solution access will move from corporate to site to plant level.
Six types of access rights are offered: corporate-, site-, maintenance manager-, maintenance engineer-, operations manager- and environmental manager access. Corporate access allows operations or technical specialists to access the corporate-level dashboard, encompassing various sites and plants and all relevant associated data. Site access is provided to site managers covering various plants and plant data access.
ABB has included separate access rights for maintenance managers, maintenance engineers, operations managers and environment managers at the plant level. Because each user has specific roles and responsibilities, the access rights are tailored accordingly and provided based on the target users’ focus areas.
Datalyzer features
For compliance, efficiency and performance, the step to value begins with the ability to monitor asset health and performance, process, and safety, etc. with real-time data →07a. Datalyzer achieves this by featuring capabilities such as analysis of analyzer health data, and live system diagnostics data. Historical data trend analysis is also available for as far back as five years →07b. In this way, ABB’s Datalyzer provides value-added insights by means of the analyzer health score and correlation plots, etc. With the health score function, the user can benchmark; compare different analyzers’ health and troubleshoot an issue; in case a health score indicates a downward trend of a particular analyzer.
07a A schematic that illustrates how Datalyzer helps companies to make the shift from preventive (before) to predictive (after) maintenance. 
07b The diagram shows the key benefits of implementing Datalyzer: more data means more insights and more control; measurements are made easy and compliance is a snap.
07 The key benefits of implementing ABB’s cloud-based solutions.
The QAL3 reporting and assessment function is a key regulatory feature →07b. The QAL3 regulation requires companies to maintain and demonstrate the required quality of the measurement results during the normal operation of the analyzer management system by checking that the zero and span characteristics are consistent with those determined during QAL1. Essentially, the standard requires suitable equipment (QAL1) to be set-up correctly (QAL2) and maintain correct operation (QAL3). As per emission legislation EN- 14181 guidelines, customers must perform the QAL3 validation using any, or, a combination of CUSUM, SHEWHART and EWMA charts. ABB’s solution provides the customer with automated charts (CUSUM, SHEWHART and EWMA) for any interval (up to one year). Users can also generate reports in PDF- and EXCEL format for analysis documentation or for submission.
Looking ahead
Because data is now easily available and accessible, ABB will develop further applications to provide customers with more value-added benefits, eg, sending automatic notifications for possible future events. Also planned for a future release, is a system anomaly detection application that will enable prediction of major failure events by analyzing the outlier data.
By providing industries with a modular cloud-based platform that can be easily adapted, ABB reinforces a fundamental stance: supply a range of software, applications and services to help customers improve productivity, process performance, product quality, efficiency and safety. The next Datalyzer release will extend the capabilities to include advanced artificial intelligence (AI) and machine-learning (ML) cognitive models that will provide the end user with even more predictive and prescriptive capabilities (PEMS integration and dispersion modelling). Thus, ABB creates value beyond the asset to include the entire enterprise.
Footnote
¹ Nowadays, industries must comply with various regulations such as Industrial Emissions Directive (IED), or the Integrated Pollution Preventive Control (IPPC) Directive or the Waste Incineration Directive (WID) and the European standards, eg, QAL2, QAL1, QAL3, EN 14181.
References
[1] R. Ramachandran and S. Bhot, “ABB Ability™ Genix makes operations and asset management easy”, ABB Review 3/2021, pp. 8 – 13.
[2] W, Turton and K. Mehrotrha, “Hackers Breached Colonial Pipeline using Compromised Password”, in Bloomberg News, June 4, 2021, Available: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-06-04/hackers- breached-colonial-pipeline-using-compromised- password. [Accessed November 18, 2021].
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