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Interview with Yannick Farine, Industry Specialist Vegetable Oils, KROHNE
1. Can you provide an overview of KROHNE’s core business areas and global presence?
The KROHNE Group is a global manufacturer and provider of process instrumentation, measurement solutions, and services. We operate in various industries such as food & beverage, chemical, oil & gas, marine, nuclear, water & wastewater and others. KROHNE offers local contacts for instrumentation projects in over 100 countries. When establishing local subsidiaries, we have been following the principle of "local business, local people". This means we rely on local people, also in management, and build up local engineering and application know-how to provide the best service for our customers.
In Malaysia itself, we support a team with over 100+ people. While mainly focused on the oil & gas industry, we have added dedicated palm oil experts since the recent 3 years with its local expertise. KROHNE Malaysia also serves as a hub for solutions, such as metering skids, pipe leak detection, and recently automatic tank gauging.
2. How does KROHNE differentiate itself in the highly competitive field of industrial process instrumentation?
KROHNE is an innovative technology supplier with unique technology for challenging applications. We don't think 'products', but rather 'solutions'. This has led us to become one of the international suppliers of process instrumentation.
This spirit of creativity also sets forth in the palm oil industry, where KROHNE can offer solutions to challenging applications such as the high degree of wear & tear in crude oils, settling of impurities on equipment, dealing with high viscus by-products and entrained air during loading and unloading applications to give a few examples.
3. What are some of the latest technological innovations KROHNE has introduced in the field of flow measurement and process instrumentation?
Our latest major innovation is the introduction of the FOCUS-ON. The world's first smart metering valve developed for Industry 4.0 and a joint venture between SAMSON and KROHNE.
FOCUS is a valve, a flowmeter, a pressure meter, and a temperature meter all into one single device. What makes it unique is that the smart metering valve is completely self-regulating. With an internal PID controller, the response times are much quicker than what one would find in a classic regulating loop.
When it comes to edible oils, the FOCUS books the most successes in energy optimization and loading applications. Basically, everywhere where you need a quick responsetime. Think of heat exchangers for example. In fact, the very first prototype of FOCUS-1 was delivered to an edible oil refinery on the application of a heat exchanger.
4. How does KROHNE ensure the reliability and accuracy of its instruments in challenging industrial environments?
KROHNE can offer solutions to challenging measuring applications in the palm oil industry. We focus on applications where we can provide more reliable technology and extend their lifetime. This approach aims to reduce maintenance costs, enhance reliability, and lower overall operational expenditure (OPEX). A good example of this is wear & tear in crude palm oil. Where crude palm oil can 'sandblast' the current bent tube
mass flowmeters being used, resulting in a shorter lifetime and frequent replacement.
Instead, we offer single straight tube mass flowmeters that are less prone to abrasive damages thanks to the full-bore design. Another example would be the settling of impurities on process equipment. Think of impurities on a vibrating fork, for example, where vibrating forks often require cleaning to avoid false alarms. Instead, we work with capacitance level switches that are programmable and so able to distinguish between air, medium, and impurities as they measure the intensity of the signal instead of solely relying on point detection.
5. What trends are you seeing in the palm oil industry that are influencing the development of process instrumentation?
The rapid shift towards Industry 4.0 and digitalization. Modern palm oil companies today are looking into different ways of getting the most out of your process equipment. A flowmeter can do more than just give you the flow but also gives you a set of wide smart diagnostic functions, such as precise real-time density measurement including concentration, purity and air entrainment. Thanks to our entrained gas management, which is a standard feature on all our mass flowmeters, our mass flowmeters can operate with a wide degree of entrained air presence.
The mass flowmeter will not just keep operating, but also give you a signal that entrained air is detected and how much entrained air is measured. To make it easier to read out these smart diagnostic functions, companies are upgrading towards digital communication protocols such as Profinet and the latest Ethernet-APL. KROHNE has answered these requests with the latest release of the OPTICHECK Built-In and the development of the upcoming Ethernet-APL communication protocol.
6. What challenges does KROHNE face in the current global market, and how is the company addressing them?
KROHNE looks for ways of not only reducing the OPEX cost but also reducing the CAPEX cost while maintaining high standards. We have introduced the "standard" range of equipment, the ideal middle-ground of price versus performance. Today it seems that the Coriolis mass flowmeter is the preferred flow instrument as there are few alternatives due to the challenging process conditions in palm oil production.
However, these Coriolis mass flowmeters are high in cost for both CAPEX and OPEX and frankly not always necessary. Therefore, KROHNE provides middle-ground alternatives. Something in between a high-end mass flowmeter and a lowend Variable Area flowmeter.
The middle ground includes ultrasonic flowmeters and unique capacitance EMF meters. Ultrasonic flowmeters and capacitance EMF meters boast high accuracy using a volumetric output, while having the additional benefit of no pressure drop and are highly robust. Capacitance EMF and ultrasonic flowmeters can operate for up to 25 years with little to no maintenance.
The choice of which flowmeter to use depends on what process you have and offers a reliable and mid-end alternative to the Coriolis mass flowmeter. When you need something in between, selecting 'standard' is the way to go.