Chemical
The Chemical Manufacturing subsector is based on the transformation of organic and inorganic raw materials by a chemical process and the formulation of products. This subsector distinguishes the production of basic chemicals that comprise the first industry group from the production of intermediate and end products produced by further processing of basic chemicals that make up the remaining industry groups.
Assembly Line
Cemex kickstarts first-of-a-kind low-carbon hydrogen project using thermal plasma electrolysis in cement production
Cemex Ventures, Cemex’s corporate venture capital (CVC) and open innovation unit, announced an initial hydrogen deployment at industrial scale with HiiROC, the pioneering British hydrogen company that produces affordable, clean hydrogen, at its Rugby cement plant in the United Kingdom. Hydrogen has emerged as a low-carbon energy source within the construction industry’s decarbonization roadmap and offers potential as an energy solution to help reduce the sector’s reliance on fossil fuels and lower CO2 emissions. This venture marks a significant milestone for Cemex, as it represents the beginning of a large-scale strategic project plan with the aim to further lower its carbon emissions in cement production.
HiiROC produces carbon-neutral hydrogen using its proprietary Thermal Plasma Electrolysis (TPE) process, which requires just one-fifth of the electrical energy used in water electrolysis and captures carbon as a solid byproduct, avoiding CO2 emissions – a game-changer for the industry. HiiROC’s modular solution can be deployed as single units to full-scale industrial plants. The hydrogen produced can be used as an alternative energy source to fuel clinker production processes, helping Cemex to achieve its decarbonization goals.
Chemical Engineering Conversation: Dissecting the Route from Automation to Autonomy
At the YNOW2024 Conference in Houston (photo), the move toward autonomous operations — including artificial intelligence, robotics and beyond — was a front-of-mind topic for all in attendance. In an exclusive interview from the event, Mitsuhiro Yamamoto, a Yokogawa vice president and head of the Systems Business Div., Digital Solutions HQ, discussed the technological developments helping to move operations from industrial automation to industrial autonomy (IA2IA), and how these solutions will spur the efficiency and workforce resiliency needed to foster the energy transition. “Yokogawa is definitely advocating for the IA2IA transition, especially in chemical plants, where the number of veteran operators is decreasing and the number of younger staff is increasing. We want to make it possible for all plant personnel to devote more of their time to value-added tasks, which requires increased autonomy from the automation systems,” said Yamamoto.
A number of technology platforms are enabling autonomous transformation in the chemicals industry, even in complex chemical operations that may require manual steps or specific variances between batches or product runs. “There are still many manual processes in the chemical industry. Digital technologies enable integrated or remote operation, optimizing talent usage and enhancing maintenance activities through advanced analytics, artificial intelligence and robotics,” explained Yamamoto, also highlighting collaborative servers, as well as digital twins and open process automation (OPA), as key technologies to leverage in these areas.
FPGA-embedded optimization algorithm to maximize the acetate productivity in a dark fermentation process
This paper presents an optimization strategy to online maximize the acetate productivity rate in a dark fermentation (DF) process. The Golden Section Search algorithm is used to compute the maximum acetate productivity rate as a function of the inlet chemical oxygen demand (COD) and the dilution rate, selected as a manipulated variable. Such maximum productivity is considered as a reference by a Super-Twisting controller to regulate the real acetate productivity rate of the DF process. Due to the lack of sensors to measure the COD online, the optimization strategy includes an unknown input observation strategy integrated by a Luenberger observer interconnected to a Super-Twisting observer to estimate the inlet COD concentration. The optimization algorithm is embedded in an FPGA (Field Programmable Gate Array) device to minimize hardware resources and power consumption. The feasibility of the online optimization strategy embedded in an FPGA, using a digital architecture designed with a fixed-point format representation, is demonstrated by numerical simulations. Results show that the optimization strategy requires 53% of the logic elements and 100% of 8-bit multipliers of an FPGA Cyclone II and the power consumption estimated is only 190mW.
Toray Announces Expanded Capacity and Capabilities in Continuous Fiber Reinforced Thermoplastic Product Portfolio
Toray Advanced Composites, a leading innovator in advanced material technology, is pleased to announce the expansion of its continuous fiber reinforced thermoplastic composite materials portfolio through the acquisition of Gordon Plastics’ assets, technology, and intellectual property, located in Englewood, Colorado. This investment by Toray Advanced Composites brings expanded development, testing, and production capacity for continuous fiber reinforced thermoplastic composite unidirectional tapes and enhances Toray’s capability to process higher melting temperature polymer systems.
Imperial and BASF spinout SOLVE to digitally transform chemical manufacturing
Pandemic-beating drugs could enter production more quickly and agrichemicals such as fertilisers could be produced with fewer toxic raw materials thanks to technology from the new company SOLVE. The spinout has been launched by Imperial and global chemical company BASF under an innovative partnership model, with funding from BASF subsidiary Chemovator in a pre-seed round led by venture capital firm Creator Fund.
It is using innovative chemical processing techniques to build up large sets of data on chemical reactions, which it will use to train machine learning models to rapidly predict the optimal ways to manufacture high-value chemicals. The company is building up experimental data sets using novel techniques in flow chemistry, an advanced form of processing in which reactions are carried out in a continuous flow rather than in batch vessels. The technology is designed to enable chemical companies to scale manufacturing of new chemicals more quickly and to optimise manufacturing processes.
A propagation path-based interpretable neural network model for fault detection and diagnosis in chemical process systems
Process monitoring through automated fault detection and diagnosis (FDD) plays a crucial role in maintaining a productive and reliable chemical process system. Developments in AI and machine learning have boosted FDD model performances especially with deep learning methods. However, these neural network models are considered black-boxes where the reasoning behind a diagnosis is unclear, preventing industrial adoption. Therefore, in this study, an interpretable neural network model is proposed for FDD in chemical processes. This framework detects and diagnoses faults based on the propagation paths of different faults which are embedded into the architecture through graph convolutional networks. A mechanism for interpreting the node activations which represent process variables is developed for decision verification. The proposed method is evaluated on the benchmark Tennessee Eastman Process where it achieves a 93.56% accuracy on selected faults.
Leveraging Data for Growth
Citrine offers an AI platform designed to enable chemists and materials scientists to develop better products in less time. In big tech companies, data is abundant and there are armies of data scientists to use it primarily because software margins are huge, and these companies have been growing like crazy (maybe not forever). Chemical companies are very different. Data is relatively scarce because experiments take time to conduct, and you need lab space and the people doing the experiments are doing more than just product development. They are supporting the existing business. Citrine essentially allows R&D people to become data scientists through a no-code platform.
Citrine Informatics enables you to not hire a data scientist or two and instead allows someone like me (not a data scientist) to build my own models for whatever system I’m working on. By working on the model yourself, instead of through a data scientist, you can incorporate your expertise directly and iterate quickly. In polymeric products where formulation is essential for product development, like polyurethane foams or waterborne emulsions, I think this approach is the way.
Trillium Renewable Chemicals Selects INEOS Green Lake for World’s First Demonstration Plant for Sustainable Acrylonitrile Production
Trillium Renewable Chemicals (Trillium) announced the selection of INEOS Nitriles’ Green Lake facility in Port Lavaca, Texas to establish the world’s first demonstration plant for converting plant-based glycerol into acrylonitrile. The demonstration plant is named “Project Falcon.”
Trillium Renewable Chemicals has developed a groundbreaking technology for producing sustainable acrylonitrile, a key raw material in numerous industries, including toys, auto parts, aerospace components, medical supplies, and apparel. Selecting INEOS – the world’s leading global manufacturer of petrochemicals, underscores Trillium’s ambition to scale up its technology in an industrial environment to accelerate progress.
ENEOS and PFN Begin World’s First AI-Based Autonomous Operation of Crude Oil Processing Unit
ENEOS Corporation (ENEOS) and Preferred Networks, Inc. (PFN) announced that they started continuous autonomous operation of an atmospheric distillation unit for processing crude oil in January 2024.The atmospheric distillation unit currently operated autonomously with an AI system is located in the ENEOS Kawasaki Refinery.
With 24 key operational factors to control and as many as 930 sensors to monitor, the atmospheric distillation unit especially requires a high level of skills and experience. AI-based, continuous autonomous operation of an atmospheric distillation unit is the world’s first according to a consulting firm Globe-ing Inc.
The AI system for the atmospheric distillation unit continuously monitors 24 key operational factors and adjusts 13 valves at the same time to stabilize fluctuations resulting from crude oil switching as well as changes in crude oil throughput. The AI system has demonstrated higher stability and efficiency compared with manual operations.
New reactor could save millions when making ingredients for plastics and rubber from natural gas
The researchers’ new reactor system efficiently makes propylene from shale gas by separating propane into propylene and hydrogen gas. It also gives hydrogen a way out, changing the balance between the concentration of propane and reaction products in a way that allows more propylene to be made. Once separated, the hydrogen can also be safely burned away from the propane, heating the reactor enough to speed up the reactions without making any undesirable compounds.
Because the hydrogen can be burned inside the reactor and can operate under higher propane pressures, the technology could allow plants to produce propylene from natural gas without installing extra heaters. A plant that produces 500,000 metric tons of propylene annually could save as much as $23.5 million over other methods starting with shale gas, according to the researchers’ estimates. Those savings come on top of the operational savings from burning hydrogen produced in reaction, rather than other fuels.
A new option for calcium sulfonate greases: providing greater manufacturing flexibility
With heightened lithium demand and price volatility, many grease producers are diversifying their technology portfolio to include calcium sulfonate greases. Calcium sulfonate has long been considered the performance champion with its high shock load protection, good structural strength, seal protection, and water washout resistance. In response, Afton Chemical created a patented process that enables manufacturers to make a high-performing complex grease from its 300TBN calcium sulfonate grease. However, the promoter used in this patented grease process, isopropyl alcohol, has multiple safety classifications. Considering the difficulties in handling, Afton worked to identify a replacement promoter with a higher flashpoint and lower safety restrictions, recognizing that any substitute would not increase the formulation costs nor detract from the finished grease’s performance.
Global self-optimizing control of batch processes
This work considers to achieve near-optimal operation for a class of batch processes by employing self-optimizing control (SOC). Comparing with a continuous one, a batch process exhibits stronger nonlinearity with dynamics because of the non-steady operation condition. This necessitates a global version of SOC to achieve satisfactory performance. Meanwhile, it also makes the existing global SOC (gSOC) not directly applicable to batch processes due to the causality amongst variables. Therefore, it is necessary to extend the original gSOC to batch processes. In addition to the nonconvexity challenge of the original gSOC problem, the new extension for batch processes has to face even more challenges. Particularly, the causality due to dynamics of batch processes brings in structural constraints on controlled variables (CVs), making a CV selection problem even more difficult. To address these challenges, the gSOC problem is recast in a vectorized formulation and it is proved that the structural constraints considered are linear in the vectorized formulation. Moreover, a novel shortcut method is proposed to efficiently find sub-optimal but more transparent solutions for this problem.
There are two main types of online optimization technologies for batch processes, namely run-to-run/batch-to-batch optimization and within-batch optimization. The former is based on the repetitiveness of the batch process to iteratively update batch-to-batch operations. Optimization actions for the next batch are carried out upon the completion of the previous batch, aiming to achieve incremental performance improvements throughout the iterations. Iterative Learning Control (ILC) is a widely recognized method in this field. However, a shortcoming of this type of approaches is its failure to account for uncertainties that arise within a single batch process. As a result of such uncertainties, the behavior of the same process can vary from one batch to another, rendering knowledge learned from one batch inapplicable to another. This limitation makes ILC approaches unsuitable for such processes.
Mitsui-Celanese JV commences production of methanol derived from CO2
Fairway Methanol LLC, a US-based 50-50 joint venture between Mitsui & Co., Ltd. (Tokyo) and Celanese Corp. (Dallas, Tex.), has begun the production of methanol by using carbon dioxide (CO2) emitted from plants surrounding the joint venture’s facility. Fairway Methanol is expected to capture 180 thousand metric tons of CO2 and produce 130 thousand metric tons of low-carbon methanol per year, which leads its annual production capacity to 1.63 million metric tons per year.
Cognite Announces Beta Launch of Generative AI-Powered Remote Operations Control Room for Celanese Clear Lake Facility
Cognite, a globally recognized leader in industrial software, today announced the beta launch of a generative AI-powered Remote Operations Control Room (ROCR) at the Celanese facility in Clear Lake, Texas. Celanese, a global chemical and specialty materials company, plans to use the ROCR to deliver full visibility into the real-time operation of its sites worldwide, thereby expediting workflows and gaining operational insights orders of magnitude more efficiently.
By integrating generative AI into a Remote Operations Control Room, Cognite will increase visibility to our site leaders and their teams and enable a multitude of possibilities – from monitoring equipment performance to enhancing root cause analysis to streamlining and enhancing our processes,” said Brenda Stout, vice president of Acetyls Manufacturing at Celanese.
Value Based Product Development
People in “tech” like to talk “product market fit” and I think it does well in software as a service (SaaS) business, but it’s a dangerous philosophy to adopt in chemicals. Product market fit makes it sound like a product will work for everyone if you can just figure it out (e.g., Salesforce, Uber, Facebook), get scale to take advantage of network effects, and then iterate on new products with near zero production costs. To some degree this might be true for commodity chemicals, but the margins on commodities are often so narrow that your investors will be pissed off that you are trying to eke out a 30% gross margin business (how are you going to 10x that $5 million dollar check if you are getting such small profits? Scale? Tough sell I think).
The question is, do you have enough time to do value-based product development where it might take 5+ years from product launch (all technical and engineering work is finished) to make it a profitable business?
Celanese's Vision for an Autonomous, Self-Optimizing Plant Powered by Generative AI
One of the key things we’ve been planning to do in 2023 is scaling the (Cognite) platform, bringing all the data together, putting the right context, the right meaning to it, getting it contextualized and modeling it. As part of that investment, we’re using artificial intelligence and generative AI capabilities. But our artificial intelligence journey or generative artificial intelligence is only as good as our underlying data. So, the biggest effort for us has been to standardize the data on common data models, bring it all together, contextualize it and then start leveraging AI capabilities on top of that.
You have to make sure that whatever you’re architecting actually is intuitive and works and addresses the needs of the people. For example, you have this phone, right? I don’t need a user manual or training for this. It just works, and I am married to it. I can’t live without it. So we have to find the balance of making the right solutions for the people and keeping that in mind. Also, we have developed what we call a Digital Manufacturing Academy that is now available globally for all our users. And that academy is really around giving people the ability to upskill, have more data literacy, more digital literacy skills, and even give people the opportunity to start learning how to code, if they need to.
Development of ultra-fast computing method for powder mixing process
Powder mixing is an important operation in many industries. Numerical simulations using the discrete element method (DEM) have been widely used to analyze powder-mixing processes. However, one of the current limitations of the DEM simulation is its high computational cost. Recently, approaches that combine machine learning models and numerical simulations have attracted considerable attention for high-speed computing. However, there has been no research on high-speed computing methods for powder mixing that account for individual particle motions. Here, we propose an original machine learning model, namely, a recurrent neural network with stochastically calculated random motion (RNNSR), which enables a long-time-scale powder mixing simulation with low computational cost and high accuracy. The RNNSR is designed to learn individual particle dynamics with periodicity from short-term DEM simulation results and predict powder mixing for a longer period. The RNNSR combines a recurrent neural network and a stochastic model to predict both convective and diffusive mixing. The simulation results obtained using the RNNSR were quite similar to those obtained using the DEM in terms of the degree of powder mixing, particle velocity, and granular temperature. It was also demonstrated that the RNNSR has the capability of ultrafast computing in powder-mixing simulations. In conclusion, we demonstrated the effectiveness of the RNNSR for ultrafast computation of the powder mixing process.
🛢️🧠ENEOS and PFN Begin Continuous Operation of AI-Based Autonomous Petrochemical Plant System
ENEOS Corporation (ENEOS) and Preferred Networks, Inc. (PFN) announced today that their artificial intelligence (AI) system, which they have been continuously operating since January 2023 for a butadiene extraction unit in ENEOS Kawasaki Refinery’s petrochemical plant, has achieved higher economy and efficiency than manual operations.
Jointly developed by ENEOS and PFN, the AI system is designed to automate large-scale, complex operations of oil refineries and petrochemical plants that currently require operators with years of experience. The new AI system is one of the world’s largest for petrochemical plant operation according to PFN’s research, with a total of 363 sensors for prediction and 13 controlled elements. The companies co-developed the system to improve safety and stability of plant operations by reducing dependence on technicians’ varying skill levels.
Fixing the Haber–Bosch process
But the Haber–Bosch process hasn’t changed all that much since its discovery more than 100 years ago. The process uses iron or ruthenium catalysts to react hydrogen and nitrogen together under extreme conditions. Temperatures can reach 600°C, with pressures raised to over 200 times that of the Earth’s atmosphere.
Transforming ammonia production is likely to move in two stages. The first involves adapting current production methods so that green hydrogen can be used as a feedstock, with renewable electricity used to power the plants. Further into the future, new methods that rely on completely different chemistry could come online.
The very high pressures associated with Haber–Bosch help to maximise the amount of nitrogen and hydrgeon that is converted into ammonia in a single pass, without having to be fed back into the reactor. In current facilities, the compression systems are based on steam that is a byproduct of the reaction that makes the hydrogen feedstock from fossil hydrocarbons. But if the process is to be based on green hydrogen, it would make sense to use much more energy-efficient electric compressors.
⚗️ Industry consortium to develop modern chemical manufacturing methods
A major consortium led by Imperial and chemical company BASF is to help make chemical manufacturing more efficient, resilient, and sustainable. Imperial will receive ÂŁ17.8 million from the Engineering & Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) and industry partners under the EPSRC Prosperity Partnership programme in a consortium of organisations from across the chemicals value chain.
“Flow chemistry is inherently more sustainable than batch processing because it makes better use of heat and materials,” said lead investigator Professor Mimi Hii from Imperial’s Department of Chemistry. “It can also provide a powerful tool for automating production and the research and development of more sustainable processes. However, there are technical bottlenecks that are holding back its full implementation. Through this new consortium we will be in a strong position to address these.”
In a World First, Yokogawa’s Autonomous Control AI Is Officially Adopted for Use at an ENEOS Materials Chemical Plant
ENEOS Materials Corporation (formerly the elastomers business unit of JSR Corporation) and Yokogawa Electric Corporation (TOKYO: 6841) announce they have reached an agreement that Factorial Kernel Dynamic Policy Programming (FKDPP), a reinforcement learning-based AI algorithm, will be officially adopted for use at an ENEOS Materials chemical plant. This agreement follows a successful field test in which this autonomous control AI demonstrated a high level of performance while controlling a distillation column at this plant for almost an entire year. This is the first example in the world of reinforcement learning AI being formally adopted for direct control of a plant.
Over a 35 day (840 hour) consecutive period, from January 17 to February 21, 2022, this field test initially confirmed that the AI solution could control distillation operations that were beyond the capabilities of existing control methods (PID control/APC) and had necessitated manual control of valves based on the judgements of experienced plant personnel. Following a scheduled plant shut-down for maintenance and repairs, the field test resumed and has continued to the present date. It has been conclusively shown that this solution is capable of controlling the complex conditions that are needed to maintain product quality and ensure that liquids in the distillation column remain at an appropriate level, while making maximum possible use of waste heat as a heat source. In so doing it has stabilized quality, achieved high yield, and saved energy.
The Role of Industrial AI in Chemical Manufacturing Digitization
In order for chemical manufacturers to optimize production lines, they need to address different process inefficiencies, such as the formation of undesired side products, process instabilities, losses due to impurities and more, on an ongoing basis. Given the complexities of chemical manufacturing, it’s extremely time-consuming and difficult to understand the root causes for these process inefficiencies, let alone anticipate when they are going to happen. Often times, it is the specific behavior of the combination of multiple production parameters, or tags, that cause the inefficiency to happen.
Unlock Trapped Value – Digital Transformation in the Chemicals Industries
Business processes, a set of activities that accomplish a specific organizational goal, are everywhere throughout organizations. In this blog, I highlight four key business processes present in chemicals companies and their purposes. I also share some examples of chemicals companies that have unlocked business value within and across these processes as part of digital transformation initiatives.
Organizations should pay attention to business processes because they determine how well they can move toward achieving its sustainability, agility and profitability goals. The better a company’s processes, the more effective the business. More importantly, an organization’s business processes can become a competitive advantage for chemicals’ producers, especially if you deeply synchronize key value chain processes with manufacturing operations processes. This is critically important in the context of digital transformation initiatives.
In a World First, Yokogawa and JSR Use AI to Autonomously Control a Chemical Plant for 35 Consecutive Days
Yokogawa Electric Corporation (TOKYO: 6841) and JSR Corporation (JSR, TOKYO: 4185) announce the successful conclusion of a field test in which AI was used to autonomously run a chemical plant for 35 days, a world first. This test confirmed that reinforcement learning AI can be safely applied in an actual plant, and demonstrated that this technology can control operations that have been beyond the capabilities of existing control methods (PID control/APC) and have up to now necessitated the manual operation of control valves based on the judgements of plant personnel. The initiative described here was selected for the 2020 Projects for the Promotion of Advanced Industrial Safety subsidy program of the Japanese Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry.
The AI used in this control experiment, the Factorial Kernel Dynamic Policy Programming (FKDPP) protocol, was jointly developed by Yokogawa and the Nara Institute of Science and Technology (NAIST) in 2018, and was recognized at an IEEE International Conference on Automation Science and Engineering as being the first reinforcement learning-based AI in the world that can be utilized in plant management.
Given the numerous complex physical and chemical phenomena that impact operations in actual plants, there are still many situations where veteran operators must step in and exercise control. Even when operations are automated using PID control and APC, highly-experienced operators have to halt automated control and change configuration and output values when, for example, a sudden change occurs in atmospheric temperature due to rainfall or some other weather event. This is a common issue at many companies’ plants. Regarding the transition to industrial autonomy, a very significant challenge has been instituting autonomous control in situations where until now manual intervention has been essential, and doing so with as little effort as possible while also ensuring a high level of safety. The results of this test suggest that this collaboration between Yokogawa and JSR has opened a path forward in resolving this longstanding issue.
Make Digital Twins an Integral Part of Your Sustainability Program
Digital solutions provide the visibility, analysis and insight needed to address the challenges inherent in sustainability goals. A digital twin strategy as part of an overall digitalization plan can be a crucial capability for asset intensive industries such as refining and chemicals. A digital twin needs to encompass the entire asset lifecycle and value chain from design and operations through maintenance and strategic business planning.
Comprehensive sustainability solutions are stretching the capabilities of thermodynamic first principle-based digital twins and driving the need for the next generation of solutions. Reduced order hybrid models offer a critical capability to achieve digitalization, sustainability and business goals faster. Reduced-order models can abstract models to enterprise views which inform executive awareness and strategic decision-making. Site-wide models can run faster and more intuitively to drive agile decision-making and optimize assets to achieve safety, sustainability and profit.
Eastman to invest up to $1 billion to accelerate circular economy through building world’s largest molecular plastics recycling facility in France
Eastman plans to invest up to $1 billion in a material-to-material molecular recycling facility in France. This facility would use Eastman’s polyester renewal technology to recycle up to 160,000 metric tonnes annually of hard-to-recycle plastic waste that is currently being incinerated.
The investment would recycle enough plastic waste annually to fill Stade de France national football stadium 2.5 times, while also creating virgin-quality material with a significantly lower carbon footprint. Eastman is the largest investor at this year’s “Choose France” event, which is focused on attracting foreign investment to France.
This multi-phase project includes units that would prepare mixed plastic waste for processing, a methanolysis unit to depolymerize the waste, and polymer lines to create a variety of first-quality materials for specialty, packaging, and textile applications. Eastman also plans to establish an innovation center for molecular recycling that would enable France to sustain a leadership role in the circular economy. This innovation center would advance alternative recycling methods and applications to curb plastic waste incineration and leave fossil feedstock in the ground. The plant and innovation center would be expected to be operational by 2025, creating employment for approximately 350 people and leading to an additional 1,500 indirect jobs in recycling, energy and infrastructure.
Evonik builds world's first industrial-scale production plant for rhamnolipids
Evonik is investing a three-digit million-euro sum in the construction of a new production plant for bio-based and fully biodegradable rhamnolipids. The decision to build the plant follows a breakthrough in Evonik’s research and development. Rhamnolipids are biosurfactants and serve as active ingredients in shower gels and detergents. Demand for environ-mentally friendly surfactants is growing rapidly worldwide.
The investment at the Slovenská Ľupča site in Slovakia strengthens Evonik’s partnership with the consumer goods group Unilever, which began in 2019. At the same time the investment allows Evonik to further expand its own market position in the growth market for biosurfactants. The new plant is scheduled to come on stream in two years.
How Green Hydrogen Is Made
Hydrogen has promise as a fuel that burns without creating greenhouse gases. But the production of hydrogen isn’t necessarily as clean. Only 1% of current hydrogen production is produced from renewable sources, according to the International Energy Agency. The Wall Street Journal looks at some of the major production processes, which are often differentiated by color.
How Eastman Strives for a Circular Plastics Economy
“Mechanical recycling—where you go out and take items like single-use bottles, chop, wash and re-meld them and put them back into textiles or bottles—can only really address a small portion of the plastics that are out there,” Crawford said. After a few cycles, the polymers in the products degrade and the process is no longer possible.
Instead, Eastman uses advanced, also known as molecular or chemical, recycling. “We unzip the plastic back to its basic building blocks, then purify those building blocks to create new materials,” Crawford said. This “creates an infinite loop because that polymer can go through that process time and time again.”
Never Heard of Recycled Paint? You Have Now! - Dulux Trade Evolve
Seeq Accelerates Chemical Industry Success with AWS
Seeq Corporation, a leader in manufacturing and Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) advanced analytics software, today announced agreements with two of the world’s premier chemical companies: Covestro and allnex. These companies have selected Seeq on Amazon Web Services (AWS) as their corporate solution, empowering their employees to improve production and business outcomes.
Colgate-Palmolive Focuses on Machine Health to Improve Supply Chain Operations
Colgate-Palmolive is feeding this wireless sensor data into Augury’s machine health software platform. Pruitt pointed out that this enables Colgate-Palmolive’s machine data to be compared with machine data from more than 80,000 other machines connected to the Augury platform around the world.
“That massive analytical scale brings us insights on how to optimize the performance of equipment and make ever-smarter choices on how and where we deploy it,” Pruitt said. “What’s possible only gets more compelling as this AI solution harnesses more data to create better health outcomes for our machines and our business.”
Providing a specific example of how Augury’s Machine Health system has helped Colgate-Palmolive, Pruitt noted that the system’s AI detected rising temperatures in the drive of a tube maker and alerted the plant team. “Upon inspection, they discovered a problem with the motor’s water cooling system,” he said. “By getting it quickly resolved, we prevented the drive from failing due to overheating, which would’ve stopped the tube production line and incurred replacement costs. We figure the savings at 192 hours of downtime and an output of 2.8 million tubes of toothpaste, plus $12,000 for a new motor and $27,000 in variable conversion costs.”
Five companies make a quarter of world’s single use plastics
The top 5 companies created roughly 26 million metric tones of plastic waste fueled by demand of the United States and China.
Survey: Data Analytics in the Chemical Industry
Seeq recently conducted a poll of chemical industry professionals—process engineers, mechanical and reliability engineers, production managers, chemists, research professionals, and others—to get their take on the state of data analytics and digitalization. Some of the responses confirmed behaviors we’ve witnessed first-hand in recent years: the challenges of organizational silos and workflow inefficiencies, and a common set of high-value use cases across organizations. Other responses surprised us, read on to see why.
Leveraging AI and Statistical Methods to Improve Flame Spray Pyrolysis
Flame spray pyrolysis has long been used to make small particles that can be used as paint pigments. Now, researchers at Argonne National Laboratory are refining the process to make smaller, nano-sized particles of various materials that can make nano-powders for low-cobalt battery cathodes, solid state electrolytes and platinum/titanium dioxide catalysts for turning biomass into fuel.
On Factory Floors, a Chime and Flashing Light to Maintain Distance
Businesses like Henkel, a big German chemical company, are trying wearable sensors to prevent virus outbreaks among workers.
How to approach flow chemistry
Flow chemistry is a widely explored technology whose intrinsic features both facilitate and provide reproducible access to a broad range of chemical processes that are otherwise inefficient or problematic. At its core, a flow chemistry module is a stable set of conditions – traditionally thought of as an externally applied means of activation/control (e.g. heat or light) – through which reagents are passed. In an attempt to simplify the teaching and dissemination of this field, we envisioned that the key advantages of the technique, such as reproducibility and the correlation between reaction time and position within the reactor, allow for the redefinition of a flow module to a more synthetically relevant one based on the overall induced effect. We suggest a rethinking of the approach to flow modules, distributing them in two subclasses: transformers and generators, which can be described respectively as a set of conditions for either performing a specific transformation or for generating a reactive intermediate. The chemistry achieved by transformers and generators is (ideally) independent of the substrate introduced, meaning that they must be robust to small adjustments necessary for the adaptation to different starting materials and reagents while ensuring the same chemical outcome. These redefined modules can be used for single-step reactions or in multistep processes, where modules can be connected to each other in reconfigurable combinations to create chemical assembly systems (CAS) targeting compounds and libraries sharing structural cores. With this tutorial review, we provide a guide to the overall approach to flow chemistry, discussing the key parameters for the design of transformers and generators as well as the development of chemical assembly systems.
A Case of Applying AI to an Ethylene Plant
Unexpected equipment failures or maintenance may result in unscheduled plant shutdowns in continuously operating petrochemical plants such as ethylene plants. To avoid this, the operation status needs to be continuously monitored. However, since troubles in plants have various causes, it is difficult for human workers to precisely grasp the plant status and notice the signs of unexpected failures and need for maintenance. To solve this problem, we worked with a customer in an ethylene plant and developed a solution based on AI analysis. Using AI analysis based on customer feedback, we identified several factors from numerous sensor parameters and created an AI model that can grasp the plant status and detect any signs of abnormalities. This paper introduces a case study of AI analysis carried out in an ethylene plant and the new value that AI technology can offer to customers, and then describes how to extend the solution business with AI analysis.
Your new lab partner: A mobile robot chemist
Scalable reinforcement learning for plant-wide control of vinyl acetate monomer process
This paper explores a reinforcement learning (RL) approach that designs automatic control strategies in a large-scale chemical process control scenario as the first step for leveraging an RL method to intelligently control real-world chemical plants. The huge number of units for chemical reactions as well as feeding and recycling the materials of a typical chemical process induces a vast amount of samples and subsequent prohibitive computation complexity in RL for deriving a suitable control policy due to high-dimensional state and action spaces. To tackle this problem, a novel RL algorithm: Factorial Fast-food Dynamic Policy Programming (FFDPP) is proposed. By introducing a factorial framework that efficiently factorizes the action space, Fast-food kernel approximation that alleviates the curse of dimensionality caused by the high dimensionality of state space, into Dynamic Policy Programming (DPP) that achieves stable learning even with insufficient samples. FFDPP is evaluated in a commercial chemical plant simulator for a Vinyl Acetate Monomer (VAM) process. Experimental results demonstrate that without any knowledge of the model, the proposed method successfully learned a stable policy with reasonable computation resources to produce a larger amount of VAM product with comparative performance to a state-of-the-art model-based control.
Digitalisation at BASF: HoloLens
Automation for the people: Training a new generation of chemists in data-driven synthesis
Robotic systems that run multiple simultaneous reactions have been widely used in industry since the 1990s to optimize reaction conditions or screen catalysts, for example. Their robotic arms dispense reagents into racks of vials or into plates containing up to 1,536 individual wells, which serve as miniature reaction vessels. These systems are certainly fast, but they still need a lot of tending by human acolytes.
The answer, many researchers believe, is more data—and lots of it. Researchers have previously tried to train machine-learning algorithms by feeding them data from the chemical literature, but this comes with a lot of drawbacks. For starters, much of the information in a published chemistry paper is not in a machine-readable format, and often it is not linked to the underlying raw data. Published chemistry also tends to be highly biased toward conditions that scientists have previously determined to work for a particular reaction (Nature 2019, DOI: 10.1038/s41586-019-1540-5). All too often, chemists don’t quantify details such as a room’s temperature or the exact time that a reaction took to be completed. And chemists have a bad habit of not providing details about reactions that did not produce the outcome they hoped for, leaving an enormous amount of potentially useful information unpublished, further skewing a computer’s training set. “Synthetic chemists in academic labs are not collecting the right data and not reporting it in the right way,” says Benjamin J. Deadman, ROAR’s facility manager.
Designing Basic & Detailed Processes for Mega Methanol Plants
A thorough understanding of the processes required for a methanol plant is necessary for the selection of pumps, valves and hoses that will give life to the production facility. Specifying the types and grades of equipment required at the plant was a collaborative effort between Gabriel and the product specific experts.
The number of valves used in a mega methanol plant exceeds expectations. When asked, Gabriel expressed that “there are literally thousands of valves involved in a project like this one. There are probably 1,200 automated control valves in this plant, and that estimate does not take into account any of the manual valves used throughout the facility.” The valves he found to be the most engaging were critical process valves; high pressure steam valves, gas valves, methanol valves and oxygen valves. Each of these valve types requires extra attention and are typically custom made to suit the projects needs.
Debottlenecking Takes A Broader View
AspenTech’s strategy is to seek more innovative and lower-cost debottlenecking solutions by looking at the system in a broader way, considering whole plant operation from a process and energy point of view as opposed to addressing each bottleneck in isolation.
One such case study involves a 39,000-tonne/yr Reliance Industries’ acrylonitrile plant in India. Here, AspenTech’s modeling tool, Aspen Plus, was used to develop a steady-state model of the total plant in an effort to address a number of processing challenges. The simulation so far has spurred a 50% reduction in hydrogen cyanide emissions, a 75% decrease in effluent color and a 15% increase in acetonitrile concentration. An ongoing study at the same site also might lead to a cut in flare losses that currently are running the equivalent of about $22,500/yr.
Another project spotlighted at the conference involves cryogenic unit number one at Pemex’s Ciudad Pemex gas processing plant in Mexico. It had been operating at an efficiency of 76.72% for C2+, well below its originally designed capability of 81.94%. Once updated to reflect the plant’s current operating conditions, the Aspen Plus model pinpointed low efficiency in a heat transfer unit. Adjusting that unit gave a production improvement worth $7.6 million/yr.