When Reliance Industries Limited (RIL) expanded its refinery in Jamnager, Gujarat, India in 2008, it was given a Nelson Complexity Index of 14.0, making it one of the most sophisticated refineries in the world. The plant has an overall capacity of 1.2 million barrels per day ranking it in the top 10 refineries in the world. At the forefront of management’s concerns was a move from preventative to predictive maintenance to prevent and manage abnormal situations that lead to downtime and emergency maintenance.
RIL considered a “Foundation Fieldbus”, an all digital, serial, two-way communications system to serve the base level network comprised of 50 processing units and industry leading gross refining margins (GRM). The Jamnager complex refines sour crude, sweet crude or mixtures of both, processes low-quality crude and manufactures fuels from motor gasoline to aviation fuel. Finally, RIL’s associated petrochemical plants make plastics and fibers.
Operating At Optimum Capacity
In order to operate this complex plant most efficiently and maintain a high level of GRM, management opted for 20,000+ Foundation Fieldbus (FF) “smart field device” tags installed across 3,500 segments on the site in order to share data amongst all instrumentation and systems vendors in real time and with high precision.
Invensys Operations Management (IOM) was chosen as the “Distributed Control System” (DCS) provider and working together with RIL and MTL Instruments developed custom power supplies, intrinsic safety (IS) interfaces, network diagnostic tools to monitor fieldbus segments and provided data on the plant’s physical layer status. The new system allowed Reliance to maximize “live working,” as Foundation Fieldbus systems are connected to the communications network during maintenance. Other features installed in the system include: a high-energy trunk, monitoring and control of power supply redundancy, optimized custom junction boxes and more. All refinery operations at the Jamnager plant are now stabilized at capacity and the Foundation Fieldbus technology will allow monitoring of operational expenses, so they can be reduced.
