Fifteen minutes. That's how quickly plant personnel at ConocoPhillips must be able to respond to an alarm on the plant floor. It's a matter of safety — sometimes, a matter of life and death.
Unfortunately, until recently, the company couldn't always be sure of its ability to respond in time.
"The plant standard says in applications like tank farms, we need at least a 15-minute response time," says Alan Autenrieth, control system team leader at ConocoPhillips' Sweeny refinery in Houston. "When we started [evaluating] the physical operations — how many operators we have, where they are, and whether they can see an alarm and respond within 15 minutes — the answer didn't come back the way we wanted."
That was three years ago. Today, more than half of the Sweeny 8,000-acre site is blanketed by a wireless mesh network that places alarms in front of operators at any location, allowing them to respond faster. This same infrastructure, based on Honeywell Process Solutions' OneWireless technology, also pushes procedural instructions to operators with handheld devices and provides graphical displays of tank levels and pumps in operation.