Electricity & Water Consumption Use Case (Sustainability Webinar - Jan 2021)

[Lindsey.Wilcox]

This post summarizes the use case presented during the Advanced Analytics for Sustainability webinar held in January 2021.

Background

Manufacturers often don’t have insight into how much water and energy their facility is actually consuming.  Having a way to quickly aggregate this consumption data is important, because it provides the information necessary to determine if the process is using water and electricity efficiently when running or if the water and electricity usage is minimized when not running. 

The following use case shows how to perform some of these aggregations in Seeq and scale the calculations to other process units or assets.

For this use case, an asset tree is leveraged.  The asset tree in the following image has a separate asset for each part of the process.  For this analysis, the electricity consumption tag, the water consumption tag and the mode tag are used.

Analysis

Aggregate consumption by mode of operation

The Histogram tool is used to aggregate the consumption data by mode of operation, as described in the following steps.

1.   Create a condition that contains a capsule for each mode. This can be done using the .toCondition operator in Formula. 

Note that each of the capsules in the Mode Condition has a 'Value' property that indicates the value of the Mode signal.  These capsule properties can be used to aggregate data in the Histogram tool.

 

2.   Use the Histogram tool to create a histogram of electricity consumption by mode of operation.

 

3. To create a similar histogram for water consumption, first duplicate the Electricity Consumption by Mode histogram from the Item Properties menu.

Next, provide a new name and switch the input signal to create the second histogram

 

4. These calculations can easily be scaled to other assets using Seeq's Asset Swapping capability.  With one click, the same analytics are applied to another plant area.

 

Quantify consumption while not running

Manufacturers want to minimize consumption when their processes are not running.  To do this, they first need to quantify how much electricity is being consumed while not running and then identify instances of high usage.  This can be achieved using the following steps.

1. Use the Value Search tool to identify when the process is not running.

 

2. Use the Signal from Condition tool to quantify the total amount of electricity consumed while not running.

 

3. Use the Value Search tool to identify when the amount of electricity consumed while not running is high.

Notice that aren't any visible capsules along the top of the trend.  However, if this new condition is selected in the Details Pane, one capsule is identified in the Capsules Pane, with a duration  of 0. The duration of this capsule is 0 because the searched signal is discrete and there is only a single data point that exceeds the limit.

 

4. Since there are several areas to monitor for environmental deviations, the Treemap view can be leveraged.

The color coding of the treemap indicates which plant areas have exceeded the maximum threshold and is a great way to quickly identify parts of the process that are not performing optimally.