TWO PRODUCTS EARN HONORSBiennial awards recognize achievements that significantly enhance plant operations and economics

By Mark Rosenzweig, Editor in Chief

FOR MORE than 50 years, Chemical Processing has conferred Vaaler Awards on products that promise substantial important benefits to plants. To be eligible for this year’s awards, a product must have been commercialized in the United States between May 2013 and June 2015.

The awards, which were first bestowed in November 1964, are named after John C. Vaaler (1899–1963), chairman of Chemical Processing’s Editorial Board from 1961 until his death. He became editor-in-chief of Chemical Processing in 1946, after 24 years in the chemical and related industries.

Chemical Processing’s Editorial Board, which consists of technical professionals with diverse responsibilities and from a variety of industry sectors (see sidebar), evaluated 18 entries in 7 categories for technical significance, novelty or uniqueness, and breadth of applicability. This impartial panel didn’t have to confer any awards — but chose to honor two products:

• The One Series Safety Transmitter from United Electric Controls in the Instrumentation and Controls category; and• The DeltaV Virtual Studio from Emerson Process Management in the Software and Internet Technologies category.

SOFTWARE EASES VIRTUALIZATION

The DeltaV Virtual Studio from Emerson Process Management, Round Rock, Texas, facilitates creating and maintaining virtual control systems for development, testing, training and online production. It is designed to make every step of setting up a virtualized control system easy and consistent, says the company.

Many chemical manufacturers must deal with control systems with outdated hardware and legacy software that are difficult to maintain. Virtualization can cut control-system lifecycle costs and computer hardware dependence; it can decrease the amount of hardware to buy and maintain, and provide greater configuration flexibility. Virtualization also can extend system life by enabling easy replacement of obsolete workstations with new virtualization hardware; updates of software and hardware are independent of each other and much less disruptive to plant operations. In addition, virtualization can provide high availability and disaster recovery features to increase system reliability and

protect against disruptive events. However, companies worry that virtualization may make control systems more difficult and complicated to implement and maintain. DeltaV Virtual Studio reduces the complexity while providing all the benefits of virtualization technology, notes Emerson.

DeltaV Virtual Studio is a virtualization environment designed specifically for the process industries to facilitate easy deployment of virtual control systems for both online and off line use, according to the company. It contains virtual machine templates for control system servers, workstations, controllers, input/output subsystems and safety-system logic solvers. The templates come preconfigured with the required control system networks and DeltaV software. This simplifies system set-up and reduces the risks of configuration errors, explains Emerson

The software also affords chemical companies opportunities for remote testing and configuration in cloud-based engineering environments, the company adds.

Figure 2. Prebuilt virtual machine templates and predefined virtual networks simplify implementation. Source: Emerson Process Management.

VIRTUAL STUDIO

Electronic permissions to Emerson Process Management from Chemical ProcessingDecember © 2015 PUTMAN (Excerpted)