Oil and Gas, Chemical and Pharmaceutical Industries

We help clients in the oil and gas, chemical and pharmaecutical industries with control troubleshooting and control redesign, whether continuous or batch processes.

One common area is the use of dynamic models to predict the impact of process changes, which provides confidence that the changes will work and avoid problems during commissioning.

ISC also run an annual Process Control Academy training event.

Our clients include GSK, Johnson Matthey, Shell, Marathon Oil, DSM.

Example Projects
  • Assessment of Process Changes - A chemical company wanted to greatly reduce the size of a mixing vessel to minimise waste when changing recipes. A dynamic model was built to assess the viability of level control and the impact on composition and wider process operations. (Download project note)
  • Main Oil Line Pump Instability - offshore oil production was modelled using Hysys.Plant. The source of the instability was a combination of a controller constraint and error-squared mode of operation. (Download project presentation)
  • Correct Vessel Sizing - Use of a dynamic model to determine vessel size for a new chemical plant and to validate effect on upstream and downstream operations prior to being commissioned.
  • Evaporation Tower Level Instability - Manual operation for an important level controller had become the norm due to instability when in automatic. Two problems were identified - unreliable level measurement and poor tuning. A plan to deploy a different sensor design and subsequent retuning was put in place to solve the problem. (Download project note)
  • Cascaded Tanks Instability - A new multi-million pound production process was operating at 70% of its designed throughput. After two years without a resolution to the problem, ISC was engaged and quickly found inappropriately used function blocks in the DCS code. These were removed and controllers retuned to remedy the problem.
  • Operator Training Tool - For a rarely used manufacturing plant to capture the knowledge of an aging workforce, to represent and deploy it in a form that could be used for new staff training.