Webinars

Having a compliant Burner Management System tells you it passed its last audit — not if it is drifting toward risk, or where your next capital dollar cuts exposure. Building an enterprise-wide, live view of barrier health takes investment, and that investment must be justified. This session shows where the funding comes from: the ROI captured by extending proof-test intervals, which pays for the risk management program that gives leadership visibility into performance across every unit and site.

Attendees will receive a free BMS ROI Calculator to run this analysis on their own facilities.

Every fired-equipment operator wants longer test intervals — fewer shutdowns, less labor, and less production risk from taking safety functions offline to test them. NFPA 85, 86, and 87 all allow for design equivalency and AHJ approval of alternate designs — including testing beyond standard annual intervals. But almost no one can build the case an AHJ will accept, especially when the underlying test data was never consistent enough to trust in the first place.

This session covers both sides of that problem: how to justify a test interval extension, and how to get failure rate data good enough to justify it with. We’ll cover the field evidence that replaces conservative design-basis assumptions — prior-use failure rates, demand-based partial proof test credit, diagnostic coverage, and RRF safety margin — and the data discipline underneath it: getting day shift, night shift, and third-party instrument techs all recording pass/fail, safe/dangerous, and which component failed the same way, every time. Together, this ties back to the ROI case from Webinar 2 — the same field data that justifies the extension is what funds the enterprise risk visibility program.

Attendees will receive a Bayesian Prior-Use Failure Rate Calculator to run this analysis on their own fleet.

Does NFPA Compliance Make Your Burner Management System Less Safe? NFPA 85, 86, and 87 have long defined the baseline for Burner Management System (BMS) design and operation. But what if strict adherence to these prescriptive standards is creating a false sense of security—and in some cases, actually increasing risk?

This webinar challenges the conventional assumption that NFPA compliance equals safety. While NFPA standards define minimum requirements, they do not ensure that risk is reduced to tolerable levels. In fact, many BMS implementations rely on architectures, testing intervals, and component selections that align loosely with SIL 2 performance—regardless of actual risk exposure.

When evaluated through the lens of IEC 61511 and Layer of Protection Analysis (LOPA), it becomes clear that certain fired equipment scenarios—high occupancy, frequent demands, offsite consequences, or aggressive corporate risk targets (e.g., 1×10⁻⁵/year)—may require SIL 3 risk reduction. Yet typical NFPA-based BMS designs fall short. Field devices are often only SIL 2 capable at prescribed test intervals, and logic solver requirements are rarely sufficient to achieve higher integrity levels.

This session will challenge deeply held assumptions and provide a clear path forward: moving from “compliant” to “defensibly safe” through risk-based design, lifecycle data, and performance validation.

Variable area flowmeters, commonly called rotameters, are basic, direct acting flow measurement devices that have been around for decades and are widely used in the chemical industry because they are simple, reliable, economical, and easy to operate.

Variable area flowmeters range from basic glass tube to rugged metal tube versions and are a versatile option for flow measurement that can be used in both liquid and gas applications where a visual indication is satisfactory and extreme accuracy is not necessary. They are particularly suitable for measuring low to medium flow rates of liquids and gases where continuous visual monitoring is required.

Although most Variable Area flowmeters have limitations regarding installation orientation and fluid properties, they remain one of the most common flow measurement devices in chemical plants.

This webinar will provide information about the installation and operation of variable-area flowmeters and offers insights into best practices for reliable operation.

Mechanical Vapor Recompression (MVR) is increasingly recognized as a key technology for reducing energy consumption and carbon emissions in thermal process industries. In the chemical sector, where evaporation, distillation and heat-intensive separation processes are common, MVR can offer significant opportunities to improve energy efficiency while supporting decarbonization goals.

This webinar will provide an overview of modern MVR solutions and their application in chemical processing environments. Attendees will gain insights into how MVR technology can optimize thermal processes, enhance energy recovery, lower operating costs and improve operational reliability. Real-world examples will illustrate practical approaches to integrating MVR systems into demanding production environments.

A major focus of the session will be two success studies from the chemical industry. These projects will highlight design considerations, implementation challenges, operational performance and key lessons learned from large-scale MVR installations, demonstrating how vapor recompression can contribute to more sustainable and cost-effective chemical production.

Surge vessels such as silos are required for storing feedstock, in-process materials and final product between process steps such as blending, heating, cooling, purging, and tempering. While necessary to ensure material feed to value-add operations, they are often viewed as a required cost that does not provide direct return to the operation or product. Their primary function is material storage to decouple unit operations and allow for timing discrepancies between material delivery from upstream processes and feed required for downstream operations.

Reliable storage and feed of a bulk solid can be achieved with material flow properties testing and design of the silo and feeder according to the results of testing. Once material behavior is confirmed through testing, being able to accurately predict fill and flow sequences within surge vessels will allow for integration of value-add operations to new or existing silos and bins. By achieving this the silo becomes not only a storage system to decouple unit operations but also adds value in the process train. There are a number of different operations that have been successfully integrated into silos which will be reviewed as case studies in this webinar, along with the factors one must consider when evaluating a material and process for suitability of processing in a surge vessel.

Access to historical process data is no longer just an operational necessity; it’s the foundation for advanced analytics, regulatory compliance, and successful AI implementation. Yet many manufacturers struggle to understand how the most widely used data storage systems differ, and how to design a cohesive architecture that meets their unique data goals.

This webinar takes a deep dive into industrial historians, data lakes, and time-series databases to explain how each system is designed, where it excels, and how they work together to scale from real-time operations to advanced analytics and predictive modeling. Whether you’re evaluating your first historian implementation or modernizing an enterprise-wide data stack, you’ll leave with a clear framework for turning today’s data storage options into a scalable, future-ready industrial data architecture.