The MAR (Major Accident Reduction) and CS97 (Chirag Oil Project scope) project has successfully gone through factory acceptance testing with representatives from BP and KBR. The scope of the project was to provide Atmos applications for leak detection, pig and event tracking and online modelling for three pipelines located in the Caspian Sea. The Atmos SMT (system management tool) is used to manage the Atmos applications. The complete system is hosted in a redundant virtualized environment running on ESX servers.
The success of this project has been built upon the ease in which multiple Atmos applications can be integrated together. This project consists of two pig and event tracking systems, three leak detection systems, three data managers and an online model. These are distributed across four virtual machines. They are all managed in a uniform manner from a single interface using Atmos SMT. MAR is the first project to integrate the latest pig and event tracker system into the Atmos SMT, in line with other Atmos application.
Atmos uses a virtual network hosted on a single hardware server, which acquires data from a number of separate networks that connect to a single cross-project gateway via OPC. The system was integrated into a fully virtualized environment due to client requirements for space and heat saving. Four virtual machines were installed within a single 2U rack-mounted server. The use of the virtual machines allowed Atmos engineers to spread the applications across a number of machines and then allocate system resources as required. Snapshots of each machine can be taken to allow them to be restored whenever needed. A second ESX server is provided to give redundancy of the system.
In addition to the standard functionality of pig tracking, including the automatic and manual launch of pigs and the pig counter for each pipeline, the project has additional customization to include a pig receiver counter. The pig receiver counter informs the operator on the number of pigs which are currently stored at the pig receiver waiting for collection. The event tracking system is a customization to the pig tracker which allows the operator to track a user-defined entity from the platforms to the terminal. Examples of such entities are MEG injections, key product composition changes, off-spec product. The event tracking system tracks entities in a manner similar to a batch tracking system but without the need for online fluid property instrumentation and the additional complexity of scheduling injections and deliveries and handling fluid properties etc. The Pig and Event Tracking System also provide functionality for adding ‘comments’ which allow the operator to manually insert and edit a comment for each pig and event, which are then tracked in the pipeline. The system has a number of warnings for pig or event arrival to the terminal, including multiple settings based on both the distance to the pig receiver and the time remaining before the predicted arrival to the receiver.
The Atmos SMT provides for and handles the redundancy of the Atmos applications including the leak detection systems, the online model and the pig and event tracking systems. The Atmos SMT client GUI allows a user to view the status of the applications from a single interface. The user can view any data saved by the applications via Atmos Trend from a single interface – for monitoring the applications or for an investigation into the process.