Tank Gauging - MHT Technology Ltd

LMS Automatic Composition deployed in Virginia

adminmht — Mon, 12 Dec 2022 16:21:51 +0000

LMS 18.3.2 Deployed at LNG Site in Virginia

December 2022

MHT Technology’s LMS 18.3.2 software was deployed at the TC Energy site in Chesapeake, Virginia in December 2022. The deployment took place as part of an upgrade of their software and included the scheduled rollover feature and the new associated automatic composition facility.

TC Energy were already using 18.2.5 to monitor the stratification of their LNG storage tank, but decided to upgrade their software following a training program on the subject of LNG Rollover. The peak shaving plant in Chesapeake stores excess natural gas during the summer months when demand is low, to provide back to the national grid in the winter. In the change over from exporting to importing gas the tank contents can weather to leave a dense heel in the tank, setting up the conditions for stratification and eventual rollover.

ROLLOVER Protection

The automation starts with a scheduled profile of the tank. The Scientific Instruments 6290 gauge is sent a command by LMS to do a full profile of the tank contents. The second stage of the analysis takes place after the profile is completed; a rollover calculation takes the last 2 profiles and analyses them for stratification. If both are stratified the system is then able to compute the rate of change between the two and estimate from that, the time taken for the stratification to break down and result in a rollover event.

FULLY AUTOMATED ROLLOVER MONITORING

Alarms are used to alert operators to the tanks’ status. Keeping them informed of tank stratification and any forecasted rollover events. Additionally, a simplified user interface graphically summarises the tanks’ status.

COMMISSIONING AND TRAINING

MHT Technology flew an engineer to site to assist with the commissioning process and provided a demo system free of charge to allow staff to practice with the software as thankfully rollover events are uncommon occurrences. Like fire drills, you need to practice them, in the hope that you never need to use them.

Visit us on social networks

The post LMS Automatic Composition deployed in Virginia first appeared on MHT Technology Ltd.

The post LMS Automatic Composition deployed in Virginia appeared first on MHT Technology Ltd.

Software Insight into VTW’s Movements Package

Camille Hilditch — Tue, 16 Mar 2021 13:55:34 +0000

Overview

The tools for operators to manage the safe movement of product between locations are provided by the Movements packages in VTW. Within VTW there are two packages: “Simple” and “Full” Movements. “Simple” Movements is free on all licenses, the second “Full” Movements is a paid-for optional extra. In this article, MHT goes deeper to discuss the differences between the two and why Movements is an important consideration when choosing a tank gauging system.

Guidance and Monitoring

Operators are guided to set up a product movement, confident that it will comply with site operating policy. During the movement, the operators can monitor the progress via site customisable displays showing tank flow rate, estimated finish time, remaining and actual volumes, while the system will generate alerts at specifically configured points. All movement data is recorded within the database and can be visualised in reports and certificates.

Starting with Safety

A site’s policies for the safe movement of products are defined by those with responsibility for its safety. Maximum/minimum safe operating levels, maximum safe flow rates, and conferring authority on people to carry out certain operations are common decisions that are made when creating the policies. Movements make keeping to those policies easier by ensuring that operators plan and monitor progress.

Simple Movement Package

Give users the ability to plan and monitor tank movements

Allow target values to be calculated

Show how the movement is progressing

Generate estimated completion times

Sound alarms to alert operators as the tanks near their targets

Integration of unauthorised movement detection

Full Movement Package

Includes all the features in the simple movement package

Enforcement of site policies with regard to tank movements

Auditing of movement activities

Trend data showing progress against time

Reporting of movement certificates

Handling of multi-tank movements, for instance, receiving into multiple tanks

simple Movements

Access to the simple movement is normally made via the Grid View, customised views can be designed to optimise the information to the site’s needs, however, a Movements view is provided during installation for use as a starting point.

Movement Setup

To configure a movement the operator enters the desired outcome from the movement, he may want to empty the tank, ship a certain quantity of product, or fill it to defined level. The movement calculator uses the current tank readings as a starting point and calculates the resulting target level from the outcome according to the tank’s inventory settings. At this stage he can set pre-alarm levels to provide prompts as the movement near completion.

Tank to tank transfers can also be configured, with the calculation results being applied to both the source and destination at the same time.

Starting and monitoring the movement

When the movement details are ready, the operator clicks “Set Movement” button to start the movement. At this point unauthorised movement (leak) detection is disabled automatically. During the movement the information on the progress of the movement is calculated and shown on the grid view screen.

This information can also be displayed on the Single Tank Overview, the standard layout is shown below – but this can be customised to suit a site’s requirements.

Pre-alarms are sounded when the tank levels are within a certain distance of the target to alert the operators.

full Movements

Simple Movements leaves a lot to the operators’ judgement and experience, where the Full Movements comes in to its own is the ability for supervisors to place limits on their activities and promote safe methods of working. For instance, should a movement be planned that causes a tank to be filled beyond the Safe Maximum Fill, on full movements the operator can be:

Prevented from planning such a movement
Allowed to plan, but prevented from starting such a movement
Allowed to start a movement providing they have supervisor privileges on the system

There is a work flow for movements in Full Movements, which sees a movement progress from planned, to open, to finished and there are checks at each stage to prevent unsafe work. Movements can be paused and restarted in Full Movements allowing temporary stops on operations to be restarted from where they left off.

The configuration and setup of Full Movements can be quite daunting, many sites have to spend time reviewing operational policies, and formalising the use of Full Movements in order to get the best out of it.

The rewards for doing so are uniformity in their operators’ understanding of “How we work” as well as making it easier for them to follow the rules than work around them.

Movement Summary

The movements package opens at a summary screen, where movements in various states are shown, planned movements are awaiting execution, open movements are in progress and closed are work that is done.

Planning a movement

There are two methods for creating movements. The main method is via a movement “wizard” that guides the operator through the process in a step-by-step fashion. Unlike the simple movements more complex movement scenarios are possible: a ship receipt into multiple tanks, making a blend from multiple source tanks, long running jobs feeding and receiving a process, or managing recirculation to mix a tank.

The system eliminates many of manual calculations operators need to do, that are a frequent source of errors, when planning movements. Targets can be expressed as volumes, weights, standard volumes or observed volumes according to your needs.

Housekeeping Movements

Having worked in tank gauging for many year MHT are aware that although the big “headline” ship receipts attract the most attention, the majority of movements are more mundane. Simple housekeeping; consolidating inventory into one tank, draining water, all these movements require the same level of care as they have the potential to be as dangerous as the big movements.

A quick movement configuration method is provided to make a simple tank-to-tank transfer a snap to configure. The same level of safety and monitoring is provided on these movements, it is just that many of the options are hidden behind defaults. It really is easier for an operator to apply the site rules than deviate from them.

Monitoring the whole movement

Movements can be monitored either through the summary window, or through a movement window. If the movement is a multi-tank movement: suppose the ship must discharge into many tanks, then all the components of the movement are shown together in one place, allowing each tank to be opened and closed as and when needed.

The net flow from the ship is calculated from the individual flows from the tanks as is the accumulated volume moved and the volume remaining to be moved. This is invaluable in helping the operators understand where they are with a large, complex movement, where delays can result in demurrage charges.

Completion and Reporting

In many circumstances the movement is completed once the pumps are turned off and the valves are closed. When a custody transfer has occurred there are often more steps to follow in order to close out the movement. The Full Movements package supports the entry of manual dip values and pipeline adjustments after the tanks have settled, allowing accurate assessment of the inventory changes that have occurred.

These finalised data are then used to generate reports to document the process. The report format is defined by a Crystal Reports template that can be customised to match corporate styles.

find out how VTW can help your site today

order now

The post Software Insight into VTW’s Movements Package first appeared on MHT Technology Ltd.

The post Software Insight into VTW’s Movements Package appeared first on MHT Technology Ltd.

MHT’s Feature Insight into VTW’s New Web Service

Camille Hilditch — Tue, 08 Sep 2020 10:47:06 +0000

The move from 18.2.x to 18.3.x brings with it a change in web access to the tank gauging system. The old Tankvision Professional Web Server has been replaced with Tankvision Professional Business Information Server.

UPGRADE NOW

the Issue with the old Web Server

The old web server used a Microsoft technology called “Silverlight”. In its day Silverlight competed with Adobe Flash. However, a number of high-profile security problems with Adobe Flash dented confidence in these kinds of web application frameworks and take-up of Silverlight had been slow. Consequentially Microsoft has deprecated Silverlight, which forced us to redevelop the Web Server.

? What were the goals of the developers?

Given that the Silverlight codebase was a dead-end in terms of software product development, we took the opportunity to re-evaluate why the Web Server existed, what it should be and how it should work. For a software developer, these opportunities don’t come along too frequently, and they are quite liberating – if a little daunting.

We noticed that most users of our web server were not the technical staff and operators, but the staff working in the planning departments, the accounting department, and laboratories at our customers’ sites. These people do not want or need access to alarms and events, they principally need to get up to date inventory readings to plug into Excel spreadsheets, or check what product movements have occurred on a tank.

MHT has a dedicated support function to work with customers, through that we also saw that customers were keen to improve their cybersecurity by segregating their operational and commercial networks. The old Web Server architecture required that commercial users directly access the tank gauging system, which made achieving this segregation difficult.

GET QUOTE NOW

? Why change the name to Business Information Server?

Once we decided to focus on providing a convenient means of supporting our customers’ administrative processes it was decided that this should be emphasised by renaming the facility. We did this early on before we started writing the code so that everyone involved in the delivery could understand who the audience was and what it should do. The old “webserver” name focussed too much on the technology used and not enough on what the product delivered. “When you buy soup from the supermarket the most important consideration is the flavour, not the can it comes in.”

GET QUOTE NOW

architectural changes

Segregated server architecture

The strength of the old webserver was that once you installed the software you didn’t need to do anything more to use the webserver other than pointing your web browser at the tank gauging server. With Business Information Server this still works! However, it does mean that anyone who wants to access the service needs to be able to access the HTTP interface of the tank gauging server, which is not always desirable. To overcome this, the Business Information Server service can be installed on a different machine.

The BIS server and Tank Gauging Server can be separated by a firewall; just one port needs to be open between them. The separation means that should a piece of malware get on to the administrative network, it would need to infect the BIS server and then be crafted to use an exploit in the Tank Gauging Server to infect it. The BIS server also maintains a local cache of data for its users, so that a sudden influx of requests for the BIS would not swamp the Tank Gauging Server, imperilling tank farm operations.

What can you no longer do with the BIS?

The original webserver was envisioned as a web-based alternative for tank farm operators to use: in reality, it always lagged behind the development of the tank gauging user interface of the Windows application. Many of the features, such as Movements, never made it to the webserver, and features such as the Alarm Event Viewer never really worked well on the web platform. When we redeveloped, we took a pragmatic view and killed off several features:

Alarms and Events are no longer supported on the web interface.
The “Home Page” no longer mimics the main product.
Gauge commands are not supported.

? What new features can users expect?

By redeveloping from the ground up we were able to put some new features in that customers had been requesting for a long time; the most notable one from my perspective is Trending. We had several customers just purchase a tank gauging client license just to access the Trending graphs. These customers can now access this trending information from their web browsers, allowing them to see in near real time how stock levels have risen or fallen over time.

The developers didn’t just promote the web server grid view to be the new home page, it now offers users the ability to configure and customise their view of tank gauging data, as well as freeze it and export it to a spreadsheet for analysis. The customised views can be easily shared among users, so that common uses and processes can be supported.

Reporting received a major overhaul. We noticed that scheduled reports form a key part of many administrative processes, but that the ability to setup and configure those reports was being undertaken by the tank farm operators who didn’t consume the data and mostly didn’t understand why the reports were necessary.

GET QUOTE NOW

Trending in BIS

The developers sought to grant access to reports and place the power to schedule them in the hands of the people who consume this information. Rather than receive a pile of paper reports prepared by the operators, BIS users can log on to the portal to get the reports they want at the time they want, or have them sent to their e-mail inbox.

? What features stayed the same?

The features we kept from the old web server were the ones that were most commonly used. The ability to set manual data values is invaluable to sites with on-site laboratories, oil accountants value the ability to use our inventory calculations in the inventory calculator as well as to get detailed live data of the kind on a Single Tank Overview.

GET QUOTE NOW

How is the new server licensed?

The new server uses the same licenses as the old web server. If a user had 5 web licenses on their 18.0.2 system, they can upgrade to 18.3.1 and now they have 5 web licenses for Business Information Server. The pricing for BIS clients is exactly the same as web server clients.

When using the segregated server the license applied to the tank gauging server is used: you don’t need to buy a separate license for the BIS server. Note that this does not alleviate the customer from buying the appropriate Windows license for the BIS server.

find out how THE THE BIS can help your site today

order now

Visit us on social networks

The post MHT’s Feature Insight into VTW’s New Web Service first appeared on MHT Technology Ltd.

The post MHT’s Feature Insight into VTW’s New Web Service appeared first on MHT Technology Ltd.

MHT Launches New Terminal Automation and Tank Gauging Features in lockdown

Camille Hilditch — Wed, 03 Jun 2020 10:14:02 +0000

updated software

It is business as usual at MHT Technology and we are proud to announce new software features for our tank gauging software VTW. Thank you to all our software and testing team who have worked hard to deliver this release during the COVID-19 lockdown. Our new features, as always have been from incorporated by feedback from the customers we serve. These new features solve many common issues faced by our customers and enable their sites to be even more efficient.

It is important to continue to upgrade your systems so that you can continue making your site and safe and efficient as possible. If you are using the old VTW and SmartTAS software and are looking to upgrade then feel free to speak to our sales team.

UPGRADE NOW

? New features on our VTW tank gauging software

Business Information Server – The Business Information Server is a new feature in VTW that offers real-time tank gauging information to workers supporting tank farm operations. The service uses the latest web standards to deliver an easy user experience without compromising the security of your operational systems.

RMS2 – You can now support tank farm workers away from the control room with audio messages and warnings transmitted over site radios. The system can be used with both virtualised and redundant servers.

HM21 Inventory Calculations – Inventory calculations have been added including ethylene, propylene and butadiene. Our sales team are still available for quoting and would be happy to assist you with any questions.

? New features on SMART TAS Terminal automation software

Product UN Hazard Codes are now fully editable – customers can change the languages presented and add new hazard codes to fit their operations.

Addresses are now first-class data items in TAS – A customer can have many addresses associated with it, each being ascribed a role, such as Billing Address, Delivery Address, Safety Contact Address.

Our continued quest to bring the world’s loading bay equipment into the SmartTAS software sees the addition of seal details being entered at the bay, and support for the Danload DL8000 in a multi-arm deployment.

Integration to 3rd party systems – now possible through a new built-in OPC UA service. SmartTAS can publish live loading bay information, including transaction data such as driver names, order numbers, and vehicle registrations.

When things go wrong at site, SmartTAS now allows operators to prepare documentation for vehicles that have been manually “topped off” or moved to another loading bay to complete a load.

Visit us on social networks

The post MHT Launches New Terminal Automation and Tank Gauging Features in lockdown first appeared on MHT Technology Ltd.

The post MHT Launches New Terminal Automation and Tank Gauging Features in lockdown appeared first on MHT Technology Ltd.

LNG Information Exchange

Camille Hilditch — Tue, 13 Nov 2018 14:21:50 +0000

MHT Technology Ltd.’s Product Manager Marcus Webster recently travelled to China to support Endress+Hauser (MHT’s parent company) in visiting customers at various LNG sites. His expertise was vital in providing a deeper understanding of LNG solutions and how MHT can further develop their software to serve the needs of the Chinese market.

China is now the largest oil and natural gas importer and the market for LNG in China is experiencing a period of growth. In 2018 the country imported 53 million tonnes of LNG and this is projected to reach 95 million tonnes in 2025 according to a report from Rystad Energy. E+H is contributing to this growth by offering level and temperature measurement equipment, LNG Tank Management software and services via their Shanghai-based Sales Centre.

E+H HQ Shanghai

“I travelled to China to meet with our Sales Centre colleagues and provide training on the LNG Rollover facility in Tankvision LMS. While there I took the opportunity to visit customers to promote E+H’s LNG solutions. It was a great pleasure and honour to visit Tianjin LNG to learn about how they use their LNG software and discover ways to make our software even more useful to operators dealing with and averting rollover events.” – Marcus Webster

China’s oil imports have been booming for 25 years, with gas imports rising steadily since 2006. DATA SOURCE: BP; JTC

MHT’s LNG Tank Management System (LMS) and Mini Receiver provide an interface to LTD, level and temperature devices from all leading manufacturers. Their Rollover Prediction software ensures the safe storage of LNG and enables LNG to be sourced from different suppliers, giving terminals significant cost savings.

The post LNG Information Exchange first appeared on MHT Technology Ltd.

The post LNG Information Exchange appeared first on MHT Technology Ltd.