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Writer's pictureCraig Drabyk

Omni Provides Instrument Calibration Assistance at Biowaste Facility


A little more than a year after the start-up of a large biowaste facility, the Director of Maintenance contacted Omni for assistance with plant instrument calibration.


Omni had provided many of the new facility’s inline instruments, which came factory-calibrated and were looped-checked before commissioning. Many other instruments serving process equipment were in need of calibration, as well, and Omni was also tasked with determining which of these instruments were critical, in which case they would need to be calibrated annually, and which were non-critical. This would require contacting each of the eight manufacturers that supplied the process equipment.


With some help from the director and several days of work, we were able to develop a comprehensive list of critical instruments on process equipment that could be combined with our list of critical factory-calibrated instruments. These included load cells and temperature, pressure, level, flow, conductivity, and pH instruments, as well as a number of instruments and control valves our client considered to be key to their operation.


Our next challenge was determining how specific instruments were to be calibrated, as some required special attention. Specific hardware was required for calibrating tank wall temperature transmitters, and key flow meters had to be removed and temporarily replaced with spool pieces while they were sent out for calibration. Tank level transmitters were calibrated using clean, empty tanks, and load cells were calibrated using weights.


Because the facility could not be shut down during calibration, we needed to carefully schedule specific equipment and plant areas for the procedure. Where systems were redundant, this was a fairly straightforward process, but others would need to be calibrated between batches or on the second shift when production was lighter.


The entire calibration effort took 3 ½ weeks to complete, and one tank level transmitter was found to need replacement. All of the facility’s critical process instruments were identified and calibrated with documentation. Two waste neutralization pH meters required monthly calibration, so Omni trained plant personnel on how to calibrate them in-house and provided them with two new test kits. In the end, the client was extremely pleased with the outcome and the new critical instruments list that would make the calibration process much easier in the years to come.


About Omni


Omni Instrumentation & Electrical Services, Inc., located in New Jersey and Maryland, is a premier instrumentation and electrical contractor, providing superior total care solutions since 1986. Services include instrument installation, tubing installation, instrument calibration, control loop testing, startup and commissioning, power and lighting, process control wiring, BMS wiring, telecommunications and data wiring, fire alarm wiring, security wiring, process network wiring, and control panel fabrication. Omni Instrumentation & Electrical Services, Inc., is certified in Foundation Fieldbus, Profibus, DeviceNet and ASI-Bus installation.

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