Application of Automatic Techniques in the Handling of Physical Data for a Modern Refinery

The modern refinery is perhaps the test example of continuous flowprocessing in American industry. This paper shows how the concept of automatic data handling was applied in the design, construction, and instrumentation of one of the world´s most modern refineries. Benefits made available through the integration of a modern automatic data handling system accrue not only from manpower savings, but from many other sources such as reduction in other instrument requirements, timeliness of information, etc. The primary concern of this paper is to show how the automatic data handling system is incorporated in the conceptual design of the plant, and how once installed, it is commissioned, and its data correlated with that of other information sources in such a plant. As a further point of interest, other potential applications for automatic physical data handling systems are suggested by the author.