Articles
Full Coverage for Leak Detection from OPW By Paul Reyner, Regional Manager - OPW UK With the highly competitive market in fuel distribution, companies today are concerned not only with environmental compliance and leak detection but also with tighter control of fuel inventory. High volume retailer demands have dramatically changed the performance requirements of today's automatic tank gauge systems. Emphasis at these high volume sites is focused on monitoring and controlling fuel usage from a central location. Huge increases in volume dispensed require constant attention to avoid fuel run outs. The volume of fuel dispensed has increased dramatically from 600 to 700 thousand liters a month to as much as 2 million or more liters a month for high volume locations. There is increased demand to automate manual processes as well as improve the accuracy of the data collected. Leak detection is a small component of fuel management today. The total picture of fuel management consists not only of detecting leaks to the environment and eliminating the loss of product through inaccurate meters, theft of product and inaccurate deliveries, but also ensuring the business does not run out of fuel as the volume pumped grows. This demand for automation and greater accuracy has driven the continuous development of OPW fuel management products to include PC based software to manage fueling operations from a central location and precision inventory reconciliation within the automatic tank gauge for greater accuracy and lower operating costs. OPW SmartTalk™ PC based software integrates the functionality of the OPW Galaxy and Site Sentinel Series of automatic tank gauges into the PC environment and provides real time access to data. SmartTalk provides the owner/operator of the facility with a graphical representation of all tank inventory levels as well as the associated height/volume information in a text format. All reports that were printed in the past on the system printer can now be printed out on the PC's printer. Polled information is automatically saved in the database and can be easily exported to other management programs. OPW Galaxy Precision Inventory
Reconciliation feature integrates automatic calibration of tanks and automatic reconciliation of liquid fuel inventory into the Galaxy automatic tank gauge. It highlights discrepancies in delivery and sales data, qualifying the data and eliminating sources of errors for the station owner. The Precision Inventory Reconciliation reports quickly enable the owner/operator to view inventory trends and spot exceptions. Additionally, it saves hours each day, each week and each month from manually collecting data and filling out burdensome reports to account for fuel being sold, fuel being delivered and the remaining fuel in the tank. Additional costs savings associated with tight, more accurate, control of the liquid inventory are eliminating stock outages, return loads and rush orders. This real time measurement and collection of data provides maximum performance in the ability to accurately measure the amount of fuel in the tank and the fuel being pumped through the dispensers. Data Collection The data used in the reconciliation process is collected, processed and
converted from raw heights & temperatures to volume. The resulting volumes are then compared to the opening volumes to calculate an observed or measured (physical tank) sales volume. Meter readings are compared to the opening meter readings to calculate metered sales volumes. The metered and measured amounts are added to the daily cumulative volumes and are used to generate the monthly inventory control (MIC) reports. Additionally, the data is checked to see if a delivery or water removal has occurred. If so, the delivery or removal amounts are calculated and stored for the reports. The reconciliation reports are available in either net or gross volume. These are also available on a current month or stored months' basis. The Monthly Inventory Control report provides for each day the opening volume (physically measured), the metered sales, calculated volume (opening-metered), the ending volume (physically measured), and a corresponding over/short (ending volume-calculated volume). In addition, it provides a total delivery and
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