Trusting Flowmeters pt 2

In part 2 of this flowmeters series, Simon comes back to Debunk a few more myths. Is a calibration the only method to regain trust in a flow measurement? how health checks work? Is verification the same as calibration. Download and listen to find out more. 

Transcript

[00:00:09.290] - Sean 
This is a Yokogawa Australia and New Zealand podcast. Welcome back to Yokogawa debunks, conversations with industry experts to uncover the truth behind myths and misconceptions surrounding the industrial automation and instrument space. I'm your host, Sean Carhill, and thank you for joining us. 

[00:00:27.950] - Sean 
In our last episode, we discussed the importance of data integrity for flowmeters with Simon Lillie. We discussed the process, the industry's current and future challenges on having trustworthy data, and also how you can protect the settings in your flowmeter. We've had an excellent response to the first episode, so in today's episode, what we'd like to do is to delve further into the importance of being able to trust the measurements from your floor meters and address a few more myths around this important topic. So without further ado. Welcome back, Simon. 

[00:00:59.870] - Simon 
Thank you very much for having me back to continue our discussions about trusting your flow measurements. 

[00:01:05.390] - Sean 
So, Simon, there's often a myth surrounding flowmeters that if the data is deemed unreliable, that the only method to get confidence back in the measurement is to do a calibration. Is this a statement that you believe is true? 

[00:01:19.670] - Simon 
Well, calibration is one item in the kit bag for checking and trusting a flowmeter. But as we're going to discuss further today, modern flowmeters have many more capabilities to help you get your trust back in your flow measurements than just calibration. 

[00:01:33.110] - Sean 
Okay, there are many challenges faced in the process industries today, and some of these include the aging workforce, the loss of skills and challenges, especially to be profitable in a global economy that is being discussed frequently at the moment, and especially the need for resilient operations. 

[00:01:50.990] - Simon 
That's correct resilience is vital to industrial operations across all the different industry segments. Resilience relates to the ability of your plant to withstand adversity and to bounce back quickly from non-anticipated events, which is critical to everyone. 

[00:02:05.510] - Sean 
And do you believe that flowmeters play a major part in resilient operations? 

[00:02:10.670] - Simon 
Definitely, they do. To have resilient operations. You must rely on flowmeters because they're continuously tracking important parameters about the flow of liquids, gases, or steam across all the areas of your facility. If you can't trust the data from your flowmeters, you can't have a resilient operation. 

[00:02:27.710] - Sean 
Now, as we discussed in the last episode, good decision-making really comes down to trusting the data. So as we make a decision, we must have data that we trust so we can correctly evaluate the options. We also concluded in the last episode that with discussions and around how you can protect the settings of your flowmeter using something called user roles, which was a really new thing to me now that we're confident that the flowmeter settings are fixed and that the trustworthy what happens when you start to doubt the measurement your flowmeter is providing? 

[00:02:58.490] - Sean 
I mean, how can you get back that trust in the measurement? 

[00:03:01.850] - Simon 
That's a really good question and one I'm sure many of our listeners have faced and something that they're interested in hearing about. So when you lose trust in your flowmeter, you need a simple and cost-effective method of getting your trust back. Up until recently, the only real option was to remove the flowmeter and send it away for that calibration that we're discussing. And this would check the meter against the master meter and proof if the flow measurement was correct or not. 

[00:03:27.230] - Sean 
Yeah, that sounds like it could be quite disruptive and also costly for an operating plan. So is there a better solution available? 

[00:03:34.310] - Simon 
Well, today we're very lucky that there is better options available. With Yokogawa's latest generation of flowmeters. We have health check functions built into the flowmeter that allow you to check the health of the flowmeter while it's still installed in the process. The health check can quickly give you confidence in the flowmeter. You don't need to remove it from the pipe and you don't need to send it away. You can still operate while the health check is running, which is an even better advantage. A flowmeter health check can save you significantly both on time and cost, and most importantly, it can give you that confidence back in the measurement that you really need for your resilient operations. 

[00:04:10.790] - Sean 
Health checks are something that are good for all of us, but it's not always related to industrial processes and operations, but it sounds like an ideal process. So would you mind delving into this a little bit more? 

[00:04:23.390] - Simon 
Yokogawa's latest flowmeters come factory equipped with what we call a maintenance manager functionality. Now, the maintenance manager is a feature of our Total Insight concept, which is designed to give the end-users a built-in need of verification function, which allows them to perform onboard tests for the flowmeter's health. It includes a suite of diagnostics on how the process can be impacting the flow measurement as well. 

[00:04:47.030] - Sean 
I'm not an expert on this, but when you mentioned flowmeter verification, one myth that I do hear an awful lot about there is that verification is the same as calibration. Is there any truth to this? 

[00:04:58.670] - Simon 
No. They're two very different things. Calibration and verification. Basically, a calibration means that you're getting a flowmeter, putting it into a test facility, and recording its measurement against some sort of master flowmeter, which is multitudes of times more accurate than it. You'll then tune that flowmeter up, whereas the verifications use using internal checks and diagnostics within the flowmeter, sometimes also with external test tools to check the quality of the meter and check the measurements. They're quite different, and they are used for different purposes. 

[00:05:31.070] - Sean 
That's a good outline description, which helps quite a little bit for me and hopefully for some of our listeners out there, I think it's probably something that we need to go into a little bit deeper in another episode of Yokogawa Debunks. There's certainly an opportunity there for us to explain that in a bit more depth. But for now, can you explain how the maintenance manager checks the health of a flowmeter? 

[00:05:53.150] - Simon 
The maintenance manager integrates verification into the flowmeter itself, allowing the electronics to run a series of onboard tests. Now, these tests look at important circuits and give a pass or fail result once they've been completed. If a flowmeter passes the verification, you've got confidence in the measurement. You can be confident and go away that that measurement is correct. Unfortunately, if it failed to verification, the flowmeter will indicate that, but a good feature of that, it will indicate the area that caused that failure, which will allow the user to attempt to identify what might have caused the failure. 

[00:06:26.990] - Simon 
Correct that and then re-verify it. Or worst case, if it fails a second time, contact the manufacturer for additional support to help you improve that measurement. 

[00:06:36.710] - Sean 
With that in mind, is built-in flowmeters verification available for all the different range of flow technologies. Or is it just specific to a few? 

[00:06:45.530] - Simon 
At this stage, we just have the maintenance manager verification in our AdMag Total Insight Magnetic flowmeters and our Rotamass Total Insight Coriolis flowmeters, but I'm sure in the future that will evolve to other flow technologies as well. 

[00:06:58.490] - Sean 
Okay, that's clear. So maybe go back to the verification process itself. What's typically involved in that? 

[00:07:05.030] - Simon 
Well, if we have a look firstly, at a magnetic flowmeter, the verification will typically look at the magnetic circuits, the excitation circuit, and the calculation circuit within the flowmeter. It will also run through a check of all the alarms and the alarm history inside the flowmeter. If we look now at a Coriolis flowmeter, the verification will check the drive circuit, the sensor circuits, and the temperature circuits. Also looking at the hardware and the software in the electronics. With Coriolis flowmeters as well. 

[00:07:34.610] - Simon 
The most advanced Coriolis flowmeters on the market, which luckily Yokogawa has one of, have an additional option for tube health checking. Now, this is really important because the tubes are what actually is exposed to the process, and the tube health check function measures the change in stiffness of the measurement tubes, which allows detection of any changes to those tubes due to things like corrosion, erosion or abrasion. 

[00:07:58.610] - Sean 
Well, that sounds like it would be very handy to have on any site. So along with the maintenance manager verification, I believe the flowmeters also offer diagnostics to be able to help users trust the flow measurements. Maybe you could expand a little bit more on this. 

[00:08:14.330] - Simon 
Yes, no problem with that. If we have a look once again at the magnetic flowmeter, our AdMag Total Insight Magnetic flowmeters feature a number of diagnostics which include things like Adhesion diagnostics. Now, Adhesion diagnostics is a standard feature, but it allows the flowmeter to measure the resistance between the measurement electrodes and the ground. What you typically see is fouling. As that begins to build up on the measurement electrodes, it will cause the resistance to increase. At a certain point in time, the fouling becomes so high that it will start to affect your flow measurement. 

[00:08:46.730] - Simon 
So with our Adhesion diagnostic, the flowmeter can provide an alarm or an alert to the operator that there's buildup starting to occur on those electrodes, which is starting to give you a pre-warning that the measurement is soon to become compromised. Another diagnostic that we've got, which is something quite new in our ADMag Total Insight Flowmeters is bubble detection. So for accurate flow measurement, you always need to have a full pipe. And for a magnetic flowmeter, it needs to be a full pipe full of liquid, but some process upsets, like leaking valves or seals, can introduce gas into the process. 

[00:09:20.150] - Simon 
Our AdMag Total Insight Flowmeter can monitor the noise level on the measurement electrodes as well, and that noise level can detect if there's bubbles in the liquid because it will increase the noise on the electrodes. So this is another very handy diagnostic to have in your flow measurements. 

[00:09:35.270] - Sean 
That's quite a range of detailed diagnostics. When we think of trusting flowmeter data, my mind always navigates to the more critical measurements and the more complex flowmeters like magnetic or Coriolis. But what about something as simple as a variable area flowmeter, also known as a rotameter? Is there any diagnostics available that can help users trust the flow measurement for this type of floor meter? 

[00:10:01.250] - Simon 
Well, with the very simple rotameters, like a glass tube rotometer trust is very simple because you can see the tube and you can see the float inside. The real issue comes when you move to the more industrial type of the metal tube rotometers. So here you have a stainless steel tube where you can no longer see the float inside that tube. If you've got a constant flow measurement from your metal tube rotameter, many people will ask, how do I know if that's due to a constant flow? 

[00:10:27.530] - Simon 
Or is it because the floats become blocked and it's just stuck in that position? Well, to help our users with that Yokagawa's RAMC series of rotameters features a patented float blockage detection function. So this is part of our diagnostic suite. Under normal conditions, the float inside not only moves up and down with changes to the flow rate, but it also tumbles around its axis. If we can monitor this tumbling with our electronics and the tumbling drops below a threshold value, we can detect an alarm that the float has become blocked. 

[00:10:58.730] - Simon 
So with float blockage detection, you can now trust your flow measurements even on a simple device like a rotameter. 

[00:11:05.090] - Sean 
Well, with those insights, I think it's clear that trusting flow measurements is vital to making good process decisions that help operate a plant in a safe and efficient manner. Diagnostics and verification tools built into the latest flow meetings via things like maintenance manager functions mean that you can certainly provide the assurance that you can always trust your flow measurements. Now, unfortunately, we've come to the end of today's podcast. I'd like to thank Simon once more for his valuable insights, and I'd also like to leave the door ajar for him to join us again at some point in the future. 

[00:11:37.790] - Sean 
Thank you, Simon. 

[00:11:39.230] - Simon 
Thank you very much for having me back on this episode, and I really look forward to having more discussions in the future. 

[00:11:45.350] - Sean 
In the meantime, please remember to like and share this episode and we look forward to welcoming you back to our next episode of Yokogawa Debunks.