In current competitive market scenario, there is a huge pressure on the product margins. This situation is posing big challenges for business heads to retain their current market shares as well as getting new customers. Therefore, manufacturing team continuously keep on facing the challenges from our business heads to reduce the variable cost of production and enhance the plant productivity. Moreover, it is top most priority to run the plant with complete safety and meeting all environmental compliance. Therefore, digital transformation of our plant can open a new window to counter the future challenges
Table of Contents
Background
We have witnessed, plant operation has gone under unbelievable transformations during the course of industrial development. Before 18th century industrial chemicals production was mainly from batch processing. Subsequently, industrial revolution took place between 17th to 18th century and manufacturing shifted from batch to continuous processing. Today, our plants are fully automated and controlled by Industrial Control System such as SCADA, DCS, PLCs, etc. This has minimized human intervention in process control, which has reduced the variation in product quality and improved plant productivity. This way our plants have been undergoing transformational journey on continuous basis. Now, next transformational phase is Digital Transformation and to remain in competition our industries need to adopt this with agility and great conviction.
Present Scenario and Requirements
The era of digitalization began in chemical plants with digital instrumentation and distributed control systems. This transformation of chemical plants started generating huge amounts of data. Using this data, we could be able to improve our processes by using diagnostic and better control technologies, such as real-time historians and advanced process control.
APC (Advance Process Control) is the foundation for digitalization in a chemical plant. If any company wish for successful digital transformation, it is must to have APC in place. Implementation of APC eliminate or minimizes the human intervention in process control. Because, human intervention in a process is source of special cause variations, which is beyond the natural behaviour of a process. By APC implementation we can minimize process variation as the operation become human independent. This will reduce our variable cost of production and increases productivity of the plant, as a thumb rule we can get around 10% reduction in raw material and utility cost.
Future Potential
After APC implementation we can reap the benefits of Digitalization or Industry 4.0. The new technologies such as high-performance computing, the cloud and data lakes, fast internet connectivity and mobility have come together to handle this Big Data which is being generated from our DCS, IIoT devices, ERP, Asset Management Software, HRMS etc. By real-time data analytics we can get meaningful insight from this data for our processes. These can help us to take timely and intelligent decision making.
Benefits of Digital Transformation
Chemical plant digitalization will be a game-changer for improving process control through the use of artificial intelligence, machine learning and more robust data science modelling. This will make it possible to derive insights not afforded before, to capture even greater value through improvements in operations and reliability. Moreover, this will enable us to maximize margins through operational excellence programs for variable cost reduction.
Therefore, to stay competitive in future adoption of technologies like Advance Process Control, Digitalization, IIoT, Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning is inevitable for the chemical industries. These technologies have potential to enable our processes to become smart and intelligent enough. The use of AI and ML is new in this area but in future we will see smart reactors, smart distillation columns, smart furnaces, smart heat exchangers, smart extraction columns, etc. When I say smart, I mean this process equipment will act like human. In case of any disturbances and abnormalities equipment will take required appropriate actions on its own.
These intelligent actions will ensure to achieve required output with consistent quality, capacity and safety. Within plant, equipment will be capable to communicate with each other to manufacture the products with better quality, maximum productivity and safety. Moreover, equipment will be able to self-diagnose and prescribe the solutions in advance to avoid plant performance degradation.
Challenges
The challenges to adopt digital transformation in chemical industries are many. These includes cost of up-gradation of existing instruments and control system. The data security threat and clear corporate strategy is a big area of concern. Apart from this need for new skills and lack of quality data is also a big problem. Because data is the blood for machine learning models. Another reason for the slow uptake of ML & AI is an insufficient understanding of benefits and available use cases.
Ongoing Initiatives
However, industries have started using available machine learning solutions in rotating machines to predict abnormality and condition monitoring. These solutions capture the vibration data or current signature data through sensors fitted on motor. This data is taken to the cloud and analysed using machine learning algorithm. These algorithms can predict the failure of compressor or pump up to great accuracy more than 95% or so. Also, condition monitoring of pumps, compressors, vapor compression refrigeration unit etc are excellent use cases.
Conclusion
Finally, to take up digital transformation in chemical industries it is important have a clear-cut corporate strategy. We require skilled and competent work force to drive this big initiative. A team of excellent process engineer, data scientist, IT engineer & instrumentation engineer can be a good composition for this initiative. Fast capex approval and quick decision making for implementation is very critical from strategic point of view. Because, this is a race and whoever left behind, will be out of the market competition. Simultaneously convincing shop floor workers about the benefits of digital transformation is very critical for the overall success. We need to get realize them that, this change is for their support not for replacement.
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