Advanced Sensors

Source: Energy Digital

Date :03/01/2008 15:57:08

Having grown rapidly in the last three to six months, Advanced Sensors MD Khalid Thabeth reveals how partnerships and excellent service have resulted in an expanding product portfolio

Written by Lucy Mowatt and Produced by Alex Smith

Khalid Thabeth helped to found the Northern Irish company Advanced Sensors in June 2005, and has seen its products develop from the prototype stage through to global popularity. Based in Carrickfergus, County Antrim, it has state of the art laboratories and offices, which customers are encouraged to visit.

Twelve people are based at these facilities and Mr Thabeth explains, “Our laboratory is staffed with a broad base of highly skilled professionals including Photonic specialists that are responsive to the diverse challenges of our customers.” In 2008 Advanced Sensors will be enhancing the team further by recruiting additional engineers and graduates.

The disposal of the enormous amount of water is a by-product of oil production is monitored carefully by governments; most governments legislate the level of oil permitted in produced water. A typical legislative figure is 30 parts oil in every million parts of water. Khalid Thabeth says: “The legislative limit for oil discharge is being reduced almost year on year. Most oil Companies have adopted the environment as a key performance indicator and totally committed to meet the environmental legislative discharge quota.”

Historically the measurement of oil in water was performed manually in a laboratory, four to six times a day. The Advanced Sensors EX range of Oil in Water monitors measure continuously, providing measurement in real time to facilitate the dynamic management of the process, these measured values are recorded within the instrument for ten years.

Customers are also benefiting from the extensive dynamic measurement range of the instrument, at 0 – 20,000ppm, Mr Thabeth explains, “Initially the instruments were targeted at measuring discharge, but the companies that adopted the units have placed them within the process between separator stages; this provides real time data and enables them to manage each stage more effectively, identifying any bottle necks, fixing them and increasing production.”

Ease of use

The EX range of monitors use a Windows XP-based operating system, providing a robust platform for the instrument. The MD says, “Windows was chosen to provide a familiar environment for people to operate the instrument, making the instrument’s use largely self intuitive and easily accessible.”

Providing that the installation has an internet connection, the monitors can be connected to enable remote access from anywhere in the world. The monitors and the oil in water levels can be monitored from afar, which is a great advantage when the instruments are placed in extreme environments. Companies that have deployed the instruments in ambient temperatures of -40degC to +55degC need not send out personnel to recover data or diagnose a problem.

Remote access coupled with support staff available 24/7 enables Advanced Sensors to offer an extremely responsive customer support capability. The MD of the company says that if customers find any inexplicable anomalies they can call on Advanced Sensors 24 hours a day to log into the system and run tests. “What’s really unique,” he continues, “No other equipment does this – the monitor has an inbuilt full blown Ultra Violet florescent spectrometer that can not only detect how much oil is in the water, but any other chemicals used in the process.” Once process anomalies have been identified, Advanced Sensors can isolate them from the results.

The use of chemical additives is also of great interest to customers and the instrument goes some way in satisfying this interest. After remote inspection, if a site visit is required, a member of the support team is mobilised and prepares his visit armed with the information from the remote diagnosis. Often anomalies can be identified and corrected if necessary without the need of a site visit.

“Historically, customers have experienced long delays to get on site support, often to be told the equipment was working as expected and the problem is the process.” Khalid says. The Advanced Sensors team, can use remote access to find out what’s wrong and then work with the customer to resolve the problem. Often this can be done without sending someone out, saving on any unnecessary trips.

“The product was designed to be very modular, lending itself to simple infield maintenance and support should it be required,” the company’s MD explains. This means that customers can be trained to replace modules and make their own upgrades, which often logistically benefits Advanced Sensors and the Customer.

Advanced Sensors, in collaboration with their customers, have developed a novel service arrangement. The customer pays a one off fee for five years of comprehensive cover that includes everything other than travel. As part of this service contract, Advanced Sensors provide on loan a second unit, this makes for a ‘one plus one’ system, or a backup system,” Mr Thabeth explains.

This second system also periodically monitors the water content, correlates the result against the main instrument and identifies if there are any faults in the main system. If the main system does fail the back-up system permanently replaces the main system until it is repaired, this provides uninterrupted service for customers, ensuring they do not suffer from any downtime.

Collaborative design

These “best in class” systems have all been developed in close collaboration with Advanced Sensor’s customers. “We aimed to choose two local and very supportive customers that have great experience of technical collaborations.” Khalid Thabeth says. Advanced Sensors approached StatoilHydro and Talisman UK with their prototypes.

Statoil Hydro became actively involved with Advanced Sensors in October 2005 during benchmarking trials of the EX100 prototype together with other vendors equipment. “At that stage, the EX100 was not the most accurate in measurement, but excelled in many other important areas because of the great features ultrasonic self-cleaning, oil droplet homogenisation, remote access and a great development platform on which to build. From that, Statoil Hydro decided that we were the best partner to collaborate with and without a doubt, it’s been a tremendously successful collaborative effort.”

Talisman was contacted in February 2006. Talisman had already trialled many types of Oil in Water monitors without success; however, the Talisman team immediately recognised the unit’s potential and collaborated to take two units for field for trials. One of these units was placed on the Flotta Terminal on Orkney Island, the terminal is fed from many installations and many different oil types and grades of process water. The key challenge was to measure accurately whilst maintaining clean.

After development to iron out teething problems the unit was permanently installed in September 2006 where it has measured accurately without the need for any routine maintenance since. During a service check-up in December 07, 41 samples were taken for lab analysis and the values compared against the monitors results. The average variation between the monitor and the laboratory was 0.34ppm.

Global expansion

These performance and design successes have meant that the company has been overwhelmed with demand. “We obviously knew there was a global market, but we didn’t realise how quickly it would come to the fore,” Mr Thabeth states. The company is now looking to place agents in new markets, alongside distribution companies in Norway, Malaysia and Canada in order to expand.

Although the company is expanding at a vast rate, Mr Thabeth is keen to emphasise that this growth will be controlled. “Next year will be a real challenge, in order to develop and grow in a controlled and measured fashion. It’s so easy to grow a company too fast, but it’s also dangerous to grow too slowly. It’s about striking a balance. But it’s a great problem to have,” he jokes.

Advanced Sensors is currently in the process of negotiating for two new R&D collaboration projects, which will not only offer its customers an improved value proposition, but also allow Advanced Sensors to add new products to its portfolio.

Khalid Thabeth reveals that the company’s laboratories are also aiming to launch a sensor that detects water levels in oil, a water cut monitor which will be launched at the OTC conference in 2008. This means “the customer can control their whole process, in real time, from start to finish,” he concludes.