Performance Monitoring

Our supervisory solutions are able to continuously monitor and check the performance of a connected intelligent device such as a flow computer, gas chromatograph, and ultrasonic meter.

Spirit IT, as an independent company, has implemented diagnostics for most flow computer, meter and ultrasonic meter vendors. The actual required diagnostics depends highly on the ability to obtain the data from the equipment.

Data for monitoring of the performance of field equipment may be retrieved from the device e.g. ultrasonic meter itself, or alternatively, via the connected flow computer, PLC or DCS.

As the data communications throughput is optimal when connected directly to the supervisory and, more importantly because most flow computers only retrieve a minimum amount of performance monitoring data (as per AGA-9), a direct link between ultrasonic meter and supervisory computer is to be preferred.

Actual implementation at supervisory level of performance monitoring functions  depends greatly on the instrument manufacturer, but in general terms, the kind of performance monitoring functions as suggested by the flow manufacturer can be easily implemented at the supervisory computer.

This is possible because of the integration between eXLerate and Microsoft Excel, offering a vast library of graphs and charts as per Microsoft standard fully integrated at the HMI level.

Implementations for ultrasonic meters have been realized in eXLerate with most major meter vendors.

The biggest advantage with our integrated approach is the fact that instead of connecting a laptop with the engineering software to the meter an overview of the performance is available to the operator. In-depth information can be made part of the whole supervisory software functionality, so that in case of problems with the meter, immediate action in terms of alarm messages, maintenance reports, etc. can be made available to the operator.