Ara Barsamian
President & CEO
The key to a successful project is EXPERIENCE; this helps avoid problems seen before. Ara Barsamian is the President and CEO of RAI, and has worked and consulted for major oil companies, such as Exxon, Mobil, Chevron, Aramco, and PDVSA, in the area of refinery offsites automation, and gasoline and diesel blending automation. He has more than 45 years experience with blending, offsites automation, and project management. He is a member of ASTM, ISA, IBIA, and AIChE.
All of RAI’s current consulting work is in the area of blending, and tank farm automation. Some of our recent blending consulting clients in the last couple of years are:
- Colonial Pipeline
- ExxonMobil Research & Engineering
- JX Nippon Energy
- Petrobras Pasadena Refinery
- BP Cherry Point
- Motiva Port Arthur
- Motor Oil Hellas Corinth
- NIS Pancevo
- Petro-Canada Montreal
- Petro-Canada Edmonton
- Agip/Q8 Raffineria di Milazzo
- Sasol Secunda
- Suncor Sarnia
Ara started in the 1960’s with Direct Digital Control and Supervisory Advanced Process Control of refinery process units, and among the first gasoline blending control and on-line LP optimization on IBM 1800 computer systems. Ara has been involved in the first comprehensive R&D for Oil Movements automation, which resulted in the first implementation of oil movement automation computer systems using CDC-1700 and IBM 370 computers.
In the 1970’s and 1980’s he worked with the major instrumentation vendors in the development and field testing of, at that time, revolutionary Distributed Control Systems using microprocessors, from Honeywell TDC-2000 and 3000 to Foxboro Spectrum and Yokogawa Centum. In the 1990’s, he pioneered the use of neural networks for “quick-and-dirty” process modeling, particularly for inferential property estimation, use of Genetic Algorithms for non-linear blend optimizers, and Monte Carlo simulations for refinery/terminal tank farm tankage sizing optimization.
Ara has worked extensively in the development and implementation of a variety of on-line blending analyzers – particularly NIR types – and the associated shelters, sampling systems and sample recovery systems, specifically for gasoline and diesel blending and in-line blend certification. He participates in various standards and recommended practices bodies such as ISA and ASTM.
