Honeywell Technology Boosts Efficiency And Reduces Carbon Footprints

Endorsements are hard to come by in the business world. A client may favor your product or service; may even be a loyal customer who places order after order year in and year out. But where will you find a client willing to sing your praises for all to hear? At the Honeywell Users Group 2022 (HUG2022). 

More than 1,200 executives from 19 countries and diverse industries were in Orlando last month to attend HUG2022 to view a range of solutions for manufacturing facilities, whether they produce specialty chemicals or finished products for the household and personal products industry.

“We are on the edge of transition,” began Ujjwal Kumar, president of Honeywell Process Solutions. “Of course, we are also in the midst of transition. When the world was locking down, many companies were seeking transformational change. It feels like the pace of change has been permanently altered.”

To help customers keep up with change, Honeywell provides manufacturing support for Procter & Gamble, Johnson & Johnson and dozens of companies in the industry, explained Sham Afzalpirkar, general manager, Life Sciences Global LOB, Honeywell.

“Companies are undergoing a digital transformation. We support that from the raw materials coming into the factory to the products going out,” he explained. “We help define the recipe, the process and the manufacture.”

Afzalpirkar said that if the US Food and Drug Administration has an issue with a manufacturing operation, Honeywell can help them find a solution.

“We create the batch record and support it. We capture all the batch data for complete traceability,” he said.

Honeywell integrates all the data and puts it in an Electronic Batch Record (EBR).

“Every industry is about digitalization,” explained Afzalpirkar. “Every company was paper-based. But they want to know data in real time and predict what will happen. They are moving away from paper.”

Process Improvements

To get there, Honeywell develops libraries that can be used as standard operating procedures or recipes for the manufacturing process. According to Afzalpirkar, Honeywell’s system holds formulas that range from 10 steps for simpler formulas to 1,000 steps or more for vaccines. From there, Honeywell goes through the process, captures the data and converts it to a user-friendly interface, whether a tablet or desktop, so that everything is at the user’s fingertips. It takes anywhere from 2-4 months to create these libraries that eliminate paperwork and help with auditing, too.

“It helps with integration and employee retention,” noted Afzalpirkar. “Once the product is made, there is complete traceability and that helps with compliance issues.”

Among the benefits of moving away from paper: manufacturing errors go down significantly and data is always available for real-time analysis.

At HUG2022, Alberto Llorens, process automation senior engineer, Corteva Agriscience, detailed the modernization of its control systems. Corteva was formed following the Dow/DuPont merger. Now, just three years old, the company is moving away from that legacy system. Just prior to the pandemic’s start, Corteva selected Honeywell Process Solutions to get the project done. The Corteva Honeywell Automation Migration Program (CHAMP) is a multi-year initiative to modernize Corteva’s manufacturing control systems by migrating to Honeywell’s Experion Process Knowledge System (PKS).

The migration involves three disparate sites: Midland, MI; Pittsburg, CA; and Drusenheim, France. For example, Midland is a large facility with few recipes, while Drusenheim is small facility with complex recipe management.

“We like Honeywell because it is a best-in-class operation,” said Llorens.

A Better Workforce

The pandemic accelerated upheaval in the workforce. Issues such as employee churn, improved productivity and collaboration, and evolving job responsibilities are some of the key issues. Pramesh Maheshwari, VP/GM-lifecycle support and services, detailed several of the issues and provided answers to how Honeywell can help. The company offers an industry-wide, end-to-end technology-based competency management service program that enables safety, productivity, on-the-job assistance and compliance resulting in long-term sustainable business results.

Honeywell’s Advanced Process Control (APC) program provides skills gap assessment, competency plan, training and certification, continuous assistance and operational analysis. According to Maheshwari, APC is the solution for:

• Safe unit operations;
• Reliable unit operations;
• High unit utilization; and
• Economics-driven optimization.

The program is widely applied in many refineries and plants and has many options to connect with other optimized solutions.

Manas Dutta, GM, Honeywell, explained that the program relies on a range of technology including VR and AR in the training process.

“In the past, when people came to companies, they trained on the equipment, got safety instructions, learned the devices. It took months! Then they went to the classroom,” Dutta said.

Today, there is no time for such training. But the Honeywell system is immersive and effective.

“One of the most frequent questions we hear from customers is, ‘Do my people have the right skills?’” said Maheshwari. “When we implement our program on-boarding improves, retention improves and the improvements are maintained.”

Sustainability Solutions

Every company is going for net zero emissions. Digitalization can help companies achieve it, explained Ravikrishnan Srinivasan, VP/GM-industrial innovation, Honeywell. There are five important reasons for companies to embrace sustainability, according to Srinivasan:

• Increase operational efficiency by reducing costs and waste;
• Respond to or reach new customers and increase competitive advantage;
• Protect and strengthen brand and reputation and build public trust;
• Build long-term viability and success; and
• Respond to regulatory constraints and opportunities.
• Srinivasan noted that industrial, building and aerospace industries account for about 50% of greenhouse gas emissions. Honeywell helps companies use carbon footprint data to drive insights that support their sustainability initiatives on climate action.

“For end users in industrials, buildings and aerospace, we provide an end-to-end solution to consult, measure, monitor, predict, reduce and report GHG emissions,” said Srinivasan.

Honeywell’s solutions include traceability and transparency, carbon accounting and reporting, easy audit compliance, and energy and emissions optimization. The company notes that end-to-end processes are needed in order to define sustainability strategy and roadmap, implement sustainability improvement projects, and to measure, monitor, reduce and report emissions across an enterprise.

“Honeywell can help you manage the big picture with little picture accuracy. It is a journey. We give you a visual. One system of record,” said Srinivasan.

Honeywell provides a roadmap, too. To help clients reach net zero carbon emissions, Honeywell’s strategy includes operational efficiency (-10%), energy efficiency (-5%), new fuels (-30%), carbon capture utilization and storage (-20%), renewable generation (-20%) and carbon offset credits (-15%).

The company worked with Lundin Energy Norway and proved that reducing emissions isn’t a cost; it is an opportunity to make money. Lundin saved $1.2 million.

“Honeywell has been doing this for two decades, and we practice what we preach. We will be carbon neutral by 2035,” noted Srinivasan.

New Product Developments

At HUG2022, Honeywell launched an Emissions Control & Reduction Initiative designed to help customers achieve carbon neutrality in a wide range of areas. The initiative will initially focus on helping oil and gas customers with upstream, midstream and downstream operations to monitor and reduce fugitive methane emissions, which are more than 25 times as potent as carbon dioxide at trapping heat in the atmosphere according to the US Environmental Protection Agency.

By combining its portfolio of fixed, portable and personal gas detection solutions with gas cloud imaging cameras, Honeywell will provide customers with early detection of fugitive methane emissions, including the precise location of any leaks and associated data analytics and trends. Equipped with this data, users can act quickly to address leaks and other identified risks to minimize production losses and maintain compliance with legislation.

The solution, which combines wireless gas detector technology with enterprise-wide data management solutions, works in tandem with existing Leak Detection & Repair (LDAR) testing methods to improve the accuracy of reporting and increase productivity by enabling users to find production losses faster.

“The Emissions Control and Reduction Initiative expands on Honeywell’s wide range of ready-now technologies that are helping our customers meet their sustainability goals,” said Kumar. “With our pedigree in gas detection and breadth of solutions, Honeywell is providing customers with a holistic and proactive approach to emission reduction that they’ve never had before.”

Also during HUG2022, Honeywell expanded its Experion Energy Control System to facilitate the global energy transition. The system offers new virtual power plant (VPP) capability that enables users to combine smaller energy resources to create virtual resources with sufficient capacity to tap into a variety of energy markets.

The new solution allows utilities, commercial and industrial site operations and power producers to pool their diverse energy assets, no matter the size, to aid with improving the usage while maximizing revenue and minimizing costs.

Through the remote management functionality within the Experion Control System, users have autonomous control to help them choose when they buy and deploy energy reserves regardless of the weather conditions. Because Honeywell’s technology enables resources owners to utilize every renewable energy resource at their disposal, they are contributing to the global energy transition, according to the company.

Unified Process Control Platform

Honeywell’s new C300PM Controller is said to provide customers with a modern, unified process control platform. C300PM is intended for industrial operations employing Honeywell’s Enhanced High-Performance Process Manager which integrates the control environment of the legacy TotalPlant Solution and TDC 2000/3000 systems. C300PM also employs Honeywell’s deterministic CEE to execute control strategies on a constant and predictable schedule.

With C300PM, companies undertaking plant renovations or unit expansions can upgrade their controller installed base without needing to completely replace existing hardware, according to Honeywell. It helps manufacturers reduce asset ownership costs, increase production rates, manage risk and extend life of system performance.

By upgrading to the C300PM, EHPM users no longer need to develop custom functionality to obtain the same level of performance as the C300 controller in demanding applications such as blending and batch processing. Instead, C300PM utilizes increased processing speed, peer-to-peer communication between different generations of controllers and Custom Algorithm Block functionality to help optimize system performance.

C300PM incorporates the Experion PKS I/O Highly Integrated Virtual Environment (HIVE), which provides a fault-tolerant, high-speed field network allowing the controller to communicate with distributed Honeywell Universal I/O and Series C I/O.