How Aperture Transformed Safety Valve Monitoring
Return on Investment.
The experience with the client was that applying this solution had an ROI of more than 10,000%, safeguarding approximately £1.5 million in production value per year from one asset whilst improving safety.
Overview.
Safety valves are a critical safety and compliance requirement in oil and gas facilities. Best practice is to check the proper functioning of these valves after a trip and prior to start-up. Regulatory and safety bodies can request details on valve actuation performance at any time, and a valve that takes several minutes to close when it should complete in 60 seconds represents both a safety risk and a potential compliance failure.
Traditional manual checks confirm whether a valve is open or closed, but cannot easily capture how quickly it actuated. This performance degradation signal is easy to miss - an operator checking a dashboard 10 minutes after startup may see a valve in the correct state without knowing it took several minutes to get there. Manual data extraction and verification using spreadsheets represented a recurring burden, meaning checks might not happen as frequently as they should.
Intelligent Plant's Aperture app addressed this by continuously monitoring alarm and event data to calculate actuation times for every valve - identifying degrading valves before they become a problem, and providing documented performance records that can be produced when safety bodies request them.
Challenges.
The client faced several challenges with safety valve verification:
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Data access and manipulation: The required valve performance data was difficult to access and cumbersome to manipulate, with each valve requiring around 20 minutes of manual data extraction and checking using spreadsheets - a recurring burden of approximately 200 hours per verification cycle for around 600 valves.
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Time pressure during unexpected shutdowns: Time is limited during unplanned shutdowns, making thorough manual valve checking difficult precisely when it matters most.
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Undetected valve degradation causing startup delays: Valves were underperforming unexpectedly, causing delays in startup. A valve taking several minutes to actuate rather than the expected 60 seconds passes a binary open/closed check but indicates early degradation that Aperture can identify proactively.
Solution.
Intelligent Plant's Aperture app addressed these challenges by continuously monitoring alarm and event data to calculate the actuation time of every safety valve - measuring the time between a valve receiving a request to open or close and the time it actually completes that movement. This allows operators to identify valves that are actuating slowly, well before that degradation is discovered during a shutdown.
Key Elements of the Solution:
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Historic Movement Analysis: Aperture uses alarm and event data to calculate how long each valve takes to actuate, providing a continuous performance record for every valve on the asset.
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Regulatory Compliance: When safety bodies request details on valve actuation performance, Aperture can produce documented evidence of how every valve has been performing over time - something the manual Excel process could not easily deliver.
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Early Warning of Degradation: By identifying valves that are actuating more slowly than expected, Aperture gives maintenance teams advance warning so that repairs can be scheduled during planned shutdowns rather than discovered during startup when production restoration is the priority.
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Client-Specific Enhancements: Based on client feedback, Intelligent Plant further developed Aperture to better manage a large number of valves, improving the user interface and data handling to make valve management more straightforward.
Aperture provides a clear indication of whether valves are performing as expected
Results and Impact.
The deployment of Aperture delivered three distinct categories of benefit for the client:
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Increased Uptime After Shutdowns: By continuously monitoring valve actuation performance, the client significantly reduced the need to unexpectedly repair valves after shutdowns, allowing the plant to operate more continuously and efficiently. The client estimated that out of 10 trips during a year, 2 resulted in smoother restarts directly attributable to Aperture - equating to approximately 2 days of additional production per incident. This represented a possible ROI of greater than 10,000% (~£1.5 million in production value per year for that one asset).
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Reduced Engineering Burden: Aperture replaced a recurring manual verification workload of approximately 200 hours per cycle, freeing engineering resource for higher value tasks and ensuring valve performance is monitored continuously rather than periodically.
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Compliance Readiness: Aperture provided a continuously updated, documented record of valve actuation performance across all 600 valves, ensuring that details on valve performance are immediately available when requested by safety bodies.
Conclusion.
Effective safety valve management requires more than confirming that valves are open or closed - it requires continuous monitoring of how quickly they actuate, and a documented record that can be produced when safety bodies request it.
The implementation of Intelligent Plant's Aperture app provided the client with a transformative solution for safety valve monitoring. By leveraging historic alarm and event data to calculate actuation times, the app allowed the client to identify degrading valves proactively and meet regulatory requirements efficiently.
The subsequent enhancements based on client feedback further optimised the management of safety valves, leading to significant time and cost savings. This case study illustrates how advanced digital tools can enhance compliance processes, improve operational efficiency, and reduce the impact of necessary safety measures on production.