Yokogawa executives discussed several topics at the ARC Forum press conference.
New Yokogawa American CEO Chet Mroz discussed directions that the company will take over the next few years. It intends to extend from its strength in downstream oil and gas into niche solutions–the new CombustionOne solution. The company will also develop more services and solutions expanding upon the VigilantPlant Services offering introduced last year. Specifically in North America Yokogawa will also focus on upstream and midstream with additional focus on potential of gas industry, since the US just passed Russia as largest gas producer. It will also target shale gas developments, specialty chemical with particular focus on instrument, analytical and sensor products on global basis integrated with process control and network based control systems.
A review of competitive specifications along with its own tests, the new FA-M3, vitesse, is benchmarked as the fastest PLC on the market. It is a mid-to-high range product targeted for applications from machine control to network based control system. It will be marketed throughout channel and to machine OEMs. Executives described it as small and light, secure and reliable, extremely scalable.
CombustionOne solution is a packaged product targeted for control, optimization and safe operations of fired heaters, dryers, heat exchangers and the like. It combines control with the Truepeak TDL laser analyzer.