A New Method for Alarm Monitoring of Equipment Start-Up Operations with Applications to Pumps

Abstract

In practice, alarms configured for steady operating states often become a nuisance during the start-up operation of industrial equipment. As a result, they not only distract plant operators, but may also cause worse consequences, such as pump trips. Motivated by such as a practical problem, this paper presents a new alarm monitoring method for equipment start-up operations. The proposed method is capable of preventing nuisance alarms as well as achieving effective alarm monitoring during equipment start-ups. The contributions of this work are two-fold: First, an offline design framework is proposed to detect the maximum unsuppression delay time and formulate dynamic alarm limits; second, an online algorithm for alarm monitoring of equipment start-ups is proposed on the basis of the designed dynamic alarm limits and the calculation of an exact unsuppression delay time. The effectiveness and practicality of the proposed method are demonstrated by an industrial case study.

Control and Alarm Interplay and Robust State-Feedback Synthesis with an Alarm Performance Constraint

“…These indeed are not notifying an abnormality, but a normal and known shift in the operation of the plant. To address a special case of this problem, ref proposed a systematic method to suppress some alarms during plant start-up. Furthermore, repeated on–off actions of control loops may cause chattering alarms, which was addressed in ref .…”