Green Smart Plants Help Development of Petrochemical Firms

By Zhao Jingshu, China National Chemical Information Centre

Networked production equipment to achieve “internet of things” in workshops
The concept of “industrial internet of things” has provided a new breakthrough point to “Made in China 2025” and Industry 4.0. The purpose is to achieve connections between things and things, between things and people and between all items and internet, to facilitate identification, management and control and realize smart, interactive seamless connections among people, equipment and systems.

Transparent production process to establish the “nerve” system of smart plants
“Made in China 2025” clearly specifies that smartness in the manufacturing process should be promoted. Efforts should be made to push optimization by simulation, numerical control, real-time status monitoring and adaptive control of manufacturing techniques and in turn achieve smart management and control of the whole manufacturing process. The goal of increasing value can therefore be attained in discrete manufacturing sectors such as machinery, automobiles, aviation, shipbuilding, light industry, household electric appliances and electronic information through upgrading production efficiency and product efficacy. The mode for creating smart plants can promote the smartness of production equipment (production lines), establish workshop-level smart production units based on manufacturing execution system (MES) and improve abilities for accurate manufacturing, agile manufacturing and transparent manufacturing.

Unmanned production fields to create real no-labor plants
“Made in China 2025” promotes the extensive application of smart equipment such as industrial robots and mechanical arms and makes no-labor manufacturing possible. In discrete manufacturing enterprises, automatic production scheduling of numerical control processing centers, smart robots, three-coordinates measuring instruments and all other flexible manufacturing units and automatic loading/unloading scheduling conducted to work pieces, materials and cutting tools can help achieve lights-out manufacturing.

Visualized production data to make production decisions through big data analysis
Since “Made in China 2025” was proposed, information technology and industrialization have been rapidly amalgamated. Information technologies have penetrated all links of industrial chains in discrete manufacturing. Technologies such as bar codes, QR codes, RFIDs, industrial sensors, industrial automatic control systems, the industrial internet of things, ERP and CAD/CAM/CAE/CAI have gained extensive applications in discrete manufacturing. Applications of new-generation information technologies such as internet, mobile internet and internet of things in industrial sectors are especially prominent. Discrete manufacturing enterprises have also entered a new development stage of the internet industry. Data they own are getting richer, and their requirements for timely access to the data are more stringent.

Paperless production documents for efficient green manufacturing
Today, discrete manufacturing enterprises produce numerous paper documents such as process flow sheets, component blueprints, 3D models, cutting tool lists, quality papers and numerical control programs. Most of these paper documents have scattered management. Quick searching, concentrated co-sharing and real-time tracking are therefore inconvenient. Cases of paper waste and missing documents also happen easily. With paperless management of production documents, operators can quickly search, browse and download production information as needed. Data generated in the production process can be filed promptly. In this way both the efficiency of production preparations operations can be enhanced, and green paperless production can be realized.
The petrochemical industry worldwide is undergoing profound and complicated changes today. Opportunities exist side by side with challenges. With impacts from the macro economy, profit margins of petrochemical enterprises are very limited. Competition is extremely fierce. Promoting transformation and development has therefore become imperative for all petrochemical enterprises. The overall development trends of the industry are large scale, intelligent instrumentation, integration and clean production. In the course of their own development, petrochemical enterprises actively employ the tools of the information era along with advanced management concepts and technical means to construct information integration platforms, create smart plants and achieve whole-process control and optimization of operations and management. Creation of smart plants by petrochemical enterprises can improve business ability, increase production efficiency and meet requirements for both business visualization and coordinated cooperation, while making development more sustainable.
During the Thirteenth Five-Year Plan period (2016-2020), petrochemical enterprises in China are going all out to construct integrated sharing platforms for operations and management, networked smart platforms for production and operation, efficient coordinated platforms for client services, agile safe platforms for basic technologies and integrated analysis platforms for systems and big data such as big logistics, big safety, e-commerce and the internet of vehicles, according to the principle of “big platform, big system, big operation/maintenance and big safety”. They will take “smart manufacturing” as the main direction, create an upgraded version (2.0) of smart plants and enlarge pilot demonstrations on the basis of improving and upgrading four existing pilot smart plants, push the construction of smart oilfields, smart pipelines, smart logistics and smart services, promote innovation in production modes, commercial modes and service modes, construct new modes for intensive integrated operation and management and new modes for numerical networked smart production and operation, establish new petrochemical business patterns with clients as the center and internet as the carrier, and achieve optimized, scientific development of the petrochemical industry.