Tank farms are widely used in industry – from oil & gas and petrochemicals to utilities, food & beverage and agriculture. For facilities managers looking to operate tank farms reliably, monitoring fill levels and the integrity of seals is important. The potential consequences of inadequate tank farm monitoring can be disastrous, but with the development of safety regulations and equipment, such incidents are becoming less common. Good remote monitoring systems, that yield reliable data, are essential.
Monitoring of fill levels in tank farms is essential for safety and operational efficiency.
Ian Loudon, International Sales Manager at remote monitoring specialist Omniflex, explains why tank monitoring is critical, and says it can be simple too.
Without accurate information, businesspeople are in the dark. Keeping track of supply levels in tank facilities is essential: to regulate incoming materials and provide the required product quantities on demand. This is as true for hazardous chemicals and flammable petroleum storage as it is for paint and water. So how can decision makers access that critical data?
In parts of the developing world, a calibrated dipstick and cross-referencing table, or a sight glass and internal floats are still used to determine levels inside each tank. Across farms with tens or even hundreds of tanks, this is a slow and expensive process and entails an inherent lag in data reporting. Furthermore, it does not provide a safety oversight for tank levels.
In regions with access to more advanced technologies, methods like remote monitoring have been used for many years. Here, tank farms will use whatever infrastructure is available to transmit information to a central collection point, whether a physical facility or cloud-based storage. This might be done by wired internet connection if it exists on site, or if not, mobile networks or satellite-based communication can be used.
The major challenge exists not in transmitting the data, but in gathering it in the first place. In chemical or petrochemical settings, the data collection process is often costly because of the expensive instrumentation required to assess the tank levels in hazardous environments. The measurement equipment often represents up to 80% of the overall project costs to implement remote monitoring at tank farms.
Although these costs can raise eyebrows, perspective is key. The ramifications of missing an overflowing tank can be severe – in financial terms and in terms of safety. Forcing an emergency shutdown can lead to days, or sometimes weeks, of expensive downtime in production. Research from the Aberdeen group has shown that unplanned downtime at refineries and petrochemical plants costs between $10 000 and $250 000 per hour. Serious environmental damage caused by petroleum fires or chemical pollution is also a frightening consequence.
When the world-leading paint company, Dulux, engaged Omniflex to help provide direct access to vendors in the management of bulk chemical supply and on-site storage, it presented complex, monitoring-based needs. The company wanted to monitor the tank levels of various paint ingredients stored on site, such as the pigment, binder and additives. This site includes 76 tanks with various contents and the Dulux procurement team shares the cloud-based data with its 23 different vendors, located around the globe, to improve the logistics and resupply timelines.
Responding to these needs, Omniflex provided a solution based around its Data2Desktop® service. This allows for all the data described to be made available to Dulux’s vendors using conventional internet browsers, anywhere in the world. Dulux and its vendors can monitor the tank status to stay abreast of chemical supply and usage trends.
In the case of Dulux’s tank farms, it already had technology that pumped the bulk material chemical components into the mixing tank in the correct quantities, so the initial instrumentation costs were avoided. Omniflex’s remote monitoring solutions were ‘bolted on’ to the existing measurement instrumentation, saving on engineering and installation costs, and Dulux management personnel could then determine the amount of each ingredient they needed to procure.
Although the installation costs for tank monitoring are not insignificant, Loudon says the cost/benefit relationship easily justifies the expenditure. It’s not a question of: “Can I afford to implement this technology,” but rather: “Can I afford not to do so?” Loudon says.
For more information visit: www.omniflex.com
