Fabricated Oil Company (FOC), anonymity requested, uses Canary's process historian and trending analysis software solutions to collect, store, and monitor time series process data in fourteen of their data vans throughout various oil plays in the United States.
These data vans act as “mobile control rooms”, monitoring important equipment such as frack fluid blenders, chemical vans, pump engines, and various others. Collecting and monitoring process data from this equipment allows operators in the data van to control functions throughout all stages of the fracking process.
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| Example of a data van produced by Advanced Measurements |
Reliable process data collection is only part of how Canary assists FOC. Equally important to reliably collecting process data is easily extracting data from a data historian and sharing the knowledge that can be assessed from that data throughout the company.
FOC uses Canary’s data logger in each data van to collect all of the data from the data van control system. The data vans are all connected to the corporate server via a satellite connection, which is very slow and sometimes loses connection. By strategically placing the Canary’s data logger in the data van, FOC has ensured that all data is cached by the logger’s sender service and stored locally on the hard disk drive. This way, during times of network communication outage, no data is lost while transmitting to the corporate historian. Once communication connections are re-established, the corporate historian's receiver service automatically initiates the data van's sender service. The sender service then relays all cached data, in the same time order it was stored, to the corporate historian via the receiver service. For FOC, and any other Canary client, this eliminates worrying over data loss.
Operators and strategic management for FOC analyze historical and real-time process data using Canary's custom data trending tool, AxiomView. They can quickly build trend charts recalling historical data for on the fly problem management and solutions, or they can simultaneously view the entire fleet's real-time data. FOC uses AxiomView to track engine run and idle times, coolant temperature, boost and oil pressure, track fleet age, monitor engine and pump hours, and closely watch the real-time performance metrics of all equipment within a fleet.
Through one easy to read, web browser based program, the operational manager for FOC can view the entire fourteen-unit fleet, and individually drill down to individual pieces of machinery inside the fleet, from anywhere in the world. He leverages alarming software to notify himself and others of potentially dangerous operating levels, and uses the visual trends to maintain proper operating thresholds. Implementation of Canary software and better understanding both live and historical data, has allowed FOC to extend the life of their equipment, prevent downtime and equipment failure, and ultimately become more financially efficient.
