화학공학소재연구정보센터
Process Safety Progress, Vol.20, No.2, 145-151, 2001
Process automation can advance loss prevention goals
Process automation can advance loss prevention goals even in today's pressure-filled business environment of smaller workforces and subsequent needs to maximize production efficiency. The Dow Chemical Company has been totally, automated for 30 years, and has seen substantial gains in process safety and reliability. Increased process control automation can benefit other areas as well. We have consistently, seen a reduction of operating costs, faster startups and shutdowns, and improved product quality through the reduction of variability. You get your best operator 24-hours per day. As the level of automation increases and operator supervision decreases, more is demanded of the process control system. Significantly higher control system reliability in both hardware and software is needed, The control system must provide a platform that is fault tolerant in veal-time, and provide a graceful degradation of operations. This, in turn, leads to a need for process state-based control, active redundancy, and deterministic operation.