Leveraging control and monitoring technologies to improve reliability and reduce total installed costs (TIC) of electrical trace heating systems in petrochemical facilities

Electric trace heating is commonly used by the petrochemical industry for freeze protection of water lines or temperature maintenance of process fluids. An unreliable trace heating system can impact the business significantly by damaging the process fluids/piping and potentially causing lost production. Controlling and monitoring the performance of trace heating is thus important to ensure the processes are running as desired. This paper focuses on the advances made by the trace heating industry in the control and monitoring technologies to improve the reliability of trace heating systems as well as to reduce their total installed costs. A real world case study example is used to illustrate the reduction in total installed costs using control and monitoring capabilities.