One of the biggest challenges working with high-value but potentially dangerous materials such as crude oil, natural gas, or petrochemicals is protecting and increasing safety without disrupting process availability. Redundant valve arrangements that continue to function safely even if one or more valves fail are the industry preferred solution.
Requirement
A Gulf Coast plant wanted a redundant highintegrity pressure protection system (HIPPS) to prevent over-pressurization. A HIPPS acts as a safety barrier between the high-pressure and low-pressure sections of a petrochemical plant. The piped system the plant was using required frequent manual inspections and maintenance to ensure reliability, made even more difficult because there were no simple monitoring options. The components were also complicated and bulky. Plant engineers were looking for an integrated pneumatic control system that was more reliable, simple, and compact.
Solution
We already had a proven solution – the IMI Norgren Redundant Valve Manifold (RVM). A single stainless steel or aluminum valve block integrated with SIL-3 capable IMI Maxseal and IMI Herion solenoid valves makes the RVM simple to install, test, and maintain. Our instrumentation and control experts worked with the customer's engineers to build a two-out-of-three redundant valve manifold with mechanical specifications and a control alarm to meet their specific HIPPS requirements.
Tested at our Littleton CO facility and in the field, the RVM met customer's tough technical evaluation as well as European and U.S. certification standards. The compact RVM is a price competitive, plug-and-play replacement, certified to use in a SIL-3 environment. The customer can use this RVM on future projects and retrofits without costly and time-consuming design changes.