Emerson Process Management Success Story

Overview
Emerson Process Management is a leading global supplier of products, services, and solutions that measure, analyze, control, automate, and improve process-related operations. Emerson's DeltaV digital automation system makes planning, engineering, installing, commissioning, training, operating, and maintaining a company's process easy, thereby accelerating the company’s success in improving its plant performance.

One of the critical components in any successful automation system is the ability for the system to accurately record events that take place in the precise order that they occur. If something happens that is unanticipated and unwanted (what many in the industry refer to as a "process upset"), it is essential that the company be able to identify what caused the upset and determine how it can be prevented in the future. The only way a company can understand what happened before, during and after a process upset is by recording the sequence of events as they happen using a device like an SOE input card with the controllers and workstations properly synchronized through a Network Time Protocol (NTP) Server.

Challenge
"We had a need in the DeltaV™ digital automation system to provide our customers the ability to detect selected events in their process plants to one millisecond resolution, commonly referred to as sequence of events (SOE) reporting," says Chris Felts, Product Manager, DeltaV Product Marketing. "We had known for some time that this functionality was required, but it was necessary for us to sort out priorities as to when we could develop and release this new functionality. In earlier versions of the DeltaV system, we used our engineering workstation as the time master, but with customers needing us to report information in our system to one millisecond, we needed an external device that could keep time much more accurately than a PC. Therefore, we developed a Sequence of Events (SOE) card for our system that would detect events to one millisecond resolution when used in conjunction with an external time synchronization device."

Since it is necessary to record the sequence of events in their precise order, elements responsible for generating, time stamping, and communicating events must be properly synchronized. For SOE messages generated in DeltaV Release v5.2 (Spring 2001) and all subsequent releases, this is accomplished using a Network Time Protocol (NTP) Server. NTP is a standard communication protocol that allows computers to synchronize with a timeserver across a network.

"We understood that if one event in the DeltaV system is triggered out-of-sequence with the others, the entire process may fail,"said o Greg Dowd, Program Director NTP Products for Symmetricom — Timing, Test and Measurement Division. "Our Tymserve 2100 network time server offered the needed requirements to keep the system’s time synchronized and accurate."

Solution
The rack-mounted NTP TymServe™ 2100 server from Symmetricom was chosen for the DeltaV Release 5.2. The TymServe server ensures all of the controllers and workstations are synchronized with each other based on Coordinated Universal Time (UTC). The TymServe server gives the DeltaV system the required time synchronization accuracy of +/- 1 millisecond for controllers and of +/- 10 milliseconds for workstations.

"Prior to choosing Symmetricom’s TymServe server, we had a list of criteria that an external time sync device needed to meet, including cost, availability, reliability, support for a large number of nodes, NTP compatibility, and GPS synchronization," said Chris. "The Symmetricom TymServe 2100 server met all of our criteria."

Results
Emerson used the TymServe server for about one year prior to the introduction of DeltaV Release v5.2. There were four TymServe devices installed in the DeltaV software development facility used for extensive testing and development.

"Based on the feedback from our development folks, the TymServe server performed better than expected, and much better than a few other products they looked at," said Chris. "We are happy to introduce Symmetricom and their TymServe 2100 server as a solution for accurate time synchronization with the DeltaV system."

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