By Tang Yin

Security issue of the chemical industry has caught much attention. To solve it, the Chinese government rolled out a series of new policies in 2020. Unlike before, many chemical parks and companies currently adopt information and intelligent technologies to ensure safety of site operation, build big data model, eliminate security risks from production and transportation, etc.

Intelligent supervision is in urgent need

   Complexities of chemical technologies and properties of chemicals both bring various risks, which may cause serious accidents. Traditional safety management methods have many shortcomings, hence an urgent need of intelligent means, frequently mentioned in related documents, like Opinions on Spending More Efforts on Safe Production of Hazardous Chemicals issued on February 26, 2020. The Opinions calls for establishing a hazardous chemical lifecycle information monitoring system – i.e. using advanced techniques (e.g. electronic tag, big data and AI) to supervise production, storage, transportation, application, waste disposal, etc.
   In April last year, Three-Year Plan for Addressing Safety Problems Regarding Production of Hazardous Chemicals was issued. The number of people in the workplace is required to be minimized via automation, applying to equipment involving chemical technologies dangerous and highly supervised, and to upstream and downstream supporting devices involving nitration, chlorination, fluorination, diazotization and peroxidation units. Other main contents in the Plan include speeding up construction of hazardous chemical safety supervision information sharing platform, founding lifecycle information monitoring system with technologies like big data, cloud computing and AI.

Chemical parks are main forces of promoting intelligent technologies

   Increasingly more chemical enterprises will settle in chemical parks, which are extremely important for the chemical industry. Adopting intelligent technologies will be an effective way for these parks to ensure safe production.
   Chemical parks will conduct unified management of basic information related to chemical technologies with potential risks, hazardous chemicals, major hazard sources, key equipment, key places, etc., as detailed in Construction Guidelines on Intelligent Chemical Parks issued on October 11, 2020.

Big data technology helps detect security risks

   Many accidents are attributable to incomplete investigation of safety hazards. Traditional device based methods can hardly find all hidden dangers, as more toxic and flammable chemicals have been used and new technologies have become more complicated, both since 1960s. Hence, experts invent HAZOP (Hazard and Operability Study) – a systematic, process-based hazard analysis approach.
   Big data technology will play a bigger role in finding safety hazards, given its strengthening capabilities to collect, integrate, analyze and apply.

Intelligent inspection maximizes efficiency

   Inspection is indispensable for safe production. Traditional manual inspection is being replaced by intelligent inspection system, which often adopts navigational positioning, wireless communication and multisensor fusion technologies to help companies find potential safety hazards more rapidly and eliminate them in time.
   Intelligent inspection system includes three parts: 1) intelligent mobile terminal; 2) management system that enables managers to make flexible inspection plans with details like sites, contents, routes, inspectors and time; 3) wireless transmission equipment connecting related data with expert diagnosis system to obtain intelligent analysis of equipment breakdown.
   Intelligent technologies will make production of hazardous chemicals safer, with popularity of 5G technology and upgrading of big data and AI technologies.