What is Innovation?

 

Innovation has been identified by organisations and governments as a key strategy for growth and sustainability in the turbulent and highly competitive global arena. Innovation has the potential to create competitive advantage by providing new technologies and products, new services, new ways of doing things, identifying new market opportunities or serving market segments that others have ignored.

Innovate or die has been the catch phrase of the 21^st Century. The modern organisation operates in an ether of discontinuous change and is faced with numerous influences that continually challenge its integrity and survival. These include the impact of rapid globalization, discontinuous change, increasing levels of competition, technological change, unstable economic conditions, transition from an industrial to knowledge-based society, diversified workforce and increasing complexity of the external environment.

But, what is innovation?

We still find it difficult to establish a clear definition for innovation that can be accepted widely. I have attended a number of “innovation” seminars and workshops recently and have found varying definitions and uses of the word “innovation”. Therefore, I wanted to present a clear definition of innovation through this blog, having worked in the innovation space for most of my working life. In simple terms:

Innovation is the practical application of new ideas and concepts into something of value in the market, in society or in an organisation, whether it is a new product, service, process or organisational system.

Value created through innovation can be in the form of different currencies, including: economic, social, community or environmental value. The traditional definition of innovation is based on technological innovation, that is, the development of a new product or process. Non-technological innovation relates to business operations such as changes in corporate strategy, business models, and organisational structures.

Activities such as creativity, ideation, invention and R&D are just subsets of the innovation process, however, we incorrectly interchange these terms with the word “innovation”.

From my previous knowledge and experience innovation can generally be separated into five types:

1.                   Product/Service Innovation – involves the development of new products and services, or the enhancement of existing products and services. This also includes product and service extensions. e.g. the Post-It note from 3M or the Paypal service

2.                   Process Innovation – the enhancement of new processes that improves the efficiency and effectiveness of an organisation or system e.g. implementing a knowledge management system to manage documents and information in a business

3.                   Marketing Innovation – related to the development of new channels to market, innovative promotional strategies, new pricing models and new marketing concepts e.g. a good example is eBay.com or Amazon.com

4.                   Organisational Innovation – the development of new strategies, structures and organisational systems across functional areas or the whole organisation e.g. moving from a bureaucratic organisational structure to a flexible self-directed project team structure

5.                   Business Model Innovation – related to organisational innovation, however, the focus is on reviewing the business model of an organisation and investigating alternative business models e.g. Wells Fargo is now a bank when previously the company was a stagecoach business.

Dr John Kapeleri

Energy Saving in a Brewing Plant

Introduction:

The Riveja's customer is one of the world largest brewing companies. On beer brewing plant located in Eastern Europe installed Delphin LogMessage data loggers in order to install an effective monitoring system and to find ways to reduce energy consumption.

Application / Problem:

The customer is operating a brewing plant and decided to install a Delphin LogMessage monitoring system to monitor energy consumption of CO2 for beer carbonizing process, steam flows, sewage flows and electrical energy consumption.

Proposal / Solution / Hardware:

For this installation a LogMesage 200 with 10 universal analog inputs and 11 digital and counter inputs was installed in a control cabinet of the production plant.

The analog inputs are interfaced with different steam, CO2 and sewage flow meters via 4-20 mA signals. The interface o fteh 2 ware flow meters from Siemens MAG 8000 was realised through the Modbus RTU interface. The Modbus registers where easily created on the 2 serial COM ports of LogMessage device. The customer is also using the internal calculation channels to calculate indicators from the live data. For example an integrator channel is used to totalize the energy and CO2 consumption of the brewing process.The functional design is shown below.

The process supervisor has a PS with a ProfiSignal Klicks software application to monitor live reading of the process. The mimic interface was easily developed with the ProfiSignal software and is shown below.

The process supervisor has a PS with a ProfiSignal Klicks software application to monitor live reading of the process. The mimic interface was easily developed with the ProfiSignal software and is shown below.

  

Summary of Benefits:

The advantages of the LogMessage installation are the following:

Ø       The LogMessage with universal analog and digital inputs can easily record all analog 4-20 mA signals and also the digital inputs from the energy meter with pulse output.

Ø       The LogMessage devices support many serial interface and the MAG 8000 flow meters could be easily interfaced via Modbus RTU protocol

Ø       The internal calculation channels for alarm monitoring and totalize give the operator live readings of key indicators

Ø       The internal logger memory with 1 GB capacity is storing the process data for backup functions. The live data is also archived in the DataServic Configurator online data base.

Ø       The ProfiSignal Klicks software also enable the operator to generate different reports and statistics of the process

PID Controller Economics

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Process Performance is not as good as you think

 PID controllers at lowest level

• PID controllers are the “workhorse” of Process Industry

• 90 % of the controllers are PID’s

• More than 30 % of PID’s operates in manual

• More than 30 % of loops increase short term variability

• About 25 % of loops use default settings

• About 30 % of loops have equipment problems

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How could the benefit generated:
 

Batch time reduction through increased throughput in a non saturated market

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•More stable operation (operator load)

•Less system load (lifetime)

•First step towards APC

APC not useful when PID’s are badly tuned

Some details about Riveja

Riveja specializes in test and measurement systems and equipments for industrial use. Our product range covers everything from transducer to the full size production tests solutions.

In addition to product sales we design and manufacture customized test and measurement systems. Our services include automation design, manufacturing and commissioning.

Riveja’s measurement solutions are mainly used in product development, research and maintenance. We design and manufacture special systems according to customers needs. Measuring systems can be based on the ready made hardware and software or it can be custom designed.

Riveja has a wide selection of devices from transducer to the high-end analyzers. In addition to hardware and software sales we built customized systems. Typical measurable values are temperature, vibration, pressure, rotation, force, torque, strain and noise. Systems are widely used in vehicle- and defense industry, universities, research institutes, electronics and in machine building applications.

Production machines and devices should work without unplanned interruptions. High usability of productive machinery assumes predictive maintenance measurement to avoid expensive device damages and manufacturing interruptions. Riveja has wide product range that includes transducers, portable measuring devices and permanently installed monitoring systems suitable for maintenance and safety.

Our basic business principle is customer satisfaction. We want to do our best to serve our customers and make sure that customer is satisfied with our products and services. We are committed to premium quality and agreed delivery times. By our work we want to show that we are trustworthy cooperation partner.

Advanced process control

Advanced Process Control (APC) is un-doubtedly the control philosophy of the future. However, currently about 95% of all controllers in the process industry are still of the PID-type, simply because they are so easy to implement in a DCS or PLC. Consequently, even if you have installed an APC system like TopMessage, it will continue to act on the plant via the underlying PID control loops. You therefore need to have your PID loops optimally tuned, which is where TopMessage and ProfiSignal comes in.

Applications of soft sensors

Quality Control is currently realized by online analyzers and regular lab analyses. Yet online analyzers are expensive, often not available, and costly in maintenance, while lab samples are time-consuming and are frequently taken at a 4-hour interval, which is too long for closed loop quality control. A better alternative is soft sensor technology, which allows you to estimate product quality parameters in real time, so that you can start controlling quality in closed loop. This technology gives the plant operator and the control system the possibility to react faster to disturbances and keep product quality in-spec.

Soft sensors give you an estimate of parameters (such as these below) every
second, and allow you to control them in real time:

• Polymer densities
• Polymer melt indexes
• Viscosity parameters
• Concentrations of products at the outlet of a reactor, distillation column or blender
• Color parameters
• Exhaust concentrations (NOx, CO2, dioxines, opacity, etc.)
• Very large flows (e.g. cooling water of a large power plant)
• Plant efficiency. 

Process Operation Analysis

Significant benefits can be unlocked by analysing process operations, constraints, bottlenecks and control loop configurations. Payback is of the order of 1 to 6 months.
We analyse process data from your operational plant and coupled with site visits and interviews, develop an in-depth understanding of process constraints, operational challenges and business requirements. We improve PID loop performance, identify process bottlenecks and implement the required improvements.
The activity is non-intrusive and requires only a small investment. Specific process problems can be addressed, and solutions proposed and deployed in a short time period.

Benefits of using soft sensors

Product overview
Soft sensors serve the same function as physical sensors, except that values for the variable are not measured directly, but are obtained from a model of the physical sensor using other known variables as inputs.

Soft sensors are typically used to replace sensors with high maintenance requirements, short life-spans, inaccurate sensors, and for variables where evaluation involves manual sampling and laboratory analyses. Since the physically measured value is often only returned from the lab a few days later, the immediately available predicted value from the soft sensor model can be used for control purposes.

Implementing a Soft Sensor solution:

Implementing a soft sensor solution requires a structured approach based on a sound understanding of the process as a whole, and specifically, variable measurements. The procedure includes:

Data collection
Data analysis and modelling
Soft sensor model design
Performance monitoring
Deploying the process model online as a soft sensor allows for continuous feedback for system monitoring and control. This is then used in conjunction with other Smart Process Monitoring applications for further process analysis and improvement.

Use soft sensors to:Save time and money
Enable better sampling
Develop a model to predict values that are not easily or quickly measured
Replace expensive sensors with high maintenance requirements and short life-spans
Replace inaccurate sensors providing noisy, drifting readings
For proactive, consistent and increased availability of measurements
Read data to a database for offline and online processing
Use modeled outputs to develop and implement online process monitoring and control strategies

M2M solutions for data collection

The wireless machine-to-machine (M2M) world is also evolving rapidly with a growing number of devices connected to each other in various types of industrial and domestic networks. Using scalable wireless mesh networking, wireless products should be able to handle configurations scalable up to any size.


M2M wireless (including industrial applications) is sometimes regarded as the “third wave” of wireless, after office-based (Wi-Fi) and consumer based (mobile) communications.

When it comes to M2M, practitioners should make sure that new modules of any vendor offerings offer backward compatible with existing hardware and software, allowing them to leverage their existing deployments.

An interesting trend to watch in the world of industrial wireless is the increasing collaboration between traditional IT departments in the corporate office and the process engineers on the plant floors, thanks to the penetration of Ethernet in both; this spills over into areas like network monitoring, performance analysis and optimization.


In sum, wireless is continuing to grow in the industrial space as some of the newer technologies are more capable and secure. Choice does not always have to be accompanied by complexity in this case, especially when future-proofing is concerned.
See below our last project design smart system for data collection:

Application of soft sensors

Riveja's activities aim at developing methods and tools that optimise industrial processes. This includes enhancing the energy performance of existing equipment, such as dryers, or the optimization of energy and water consumption over an entire industrial site. R&D activities that are ongoing or in development include:

• Developing analysis tools to optimize steam production and utilization in complex industrial sites
• Developing methods to simultaneously optimize water and energy networks in industrial sites
• Applying data mining techniques to improve wood processing performance and save energy in sawmills and other manufacturing sectors
• Performing scoping study on the application of soft-sensors to improve process operation and energy performance

Our experience represent the following industrial sectors: Furniture, Pulp and Paper, Petrochemical, Oil Refining, Chemicals, and Food and Drink.

Soft Sensors to improve pulp and paper process operation and energy performance

The pulp and paper manufacturing industry usually faces a lack of real time measurement of product and process variables. This on-line unavailability of critical process variables can lead to undesirable variability, out of specifications production and higher energy consumption. A soft sensor provides on-line, accurate estimates of these variables, eliminating additional energy and production cost associated with out of specifications production. Soft sensors can also play a significant role in more complex systems used for process optimization, such as fault and diagnosis systems, and control systems.
A soft sensor is the correlation from various raw data sources to create a new source of useful information. It is an empirical model that infers process state and product quality variables that are difficult to measure on-line (composition, melt index, molecular distribution, etc.) from readily available process measurements (temperature, pressure, flow, etc.).
Riveja performed a scoping study for a possible longer-term research and development program (R&D) that would ultimately aim at increasing the adoption of soft sensors or "virtual analyzer" for process and energy performance in the pulp and paper industry.
This scoping study consists of the identification of the processes in the pulp and paper, which are the most promising candidates to the development and implementation of soft sensors. Also, the scoping study will help define a roadmap toward long term R&D program in this area with information from process experts and operators, R&D experts and sensors and control systems developers and providers.

Instalation for CO2 flow measurement

There is instalation at one brewery factory that I did. The system monitor and calculate flow consumtion of CO2. As hardware was used LogMessage device and ProfiSignal software.

System for flow controll

I have finished project for tank volume and pump control and monitoring:
Solutions for process monitoring

Hardware for test automation

Best hardware for test automation + profesional software:

Equipment for soft sensor systems

Features of soft sensors

Features:

• soft-sensor design;
• advice on data selection and choice of model structure;
• model validation;
• strategies for the improvement of soft-sensor performance;
• uses of soft sensors in fault detection and sensor validation;
• soft sensors in use in industrial applications such as a debutanizer column and a sulfur recovery unit.

Soft sensors

Soft sensors are inferential estimators, drawing conclusions from process observations when hardware sensors are unavailable or unsuitable; they have an important auxiliary role in sensor validation when performance declines through senescence or fault accumulation.
Soft Sensors for Monitoring and Control of Industrial Processes underlines the real usefulness of each approach and the sensitivity of the individual steps in soft-sensor design to the choice of one or the other.