Petrochemical are important part of the chemical industry as there is rising demand for synthetic material worldwide and is also important part of society and economy. They are usually derived from petroleum and other natural gases. They are playing very important part in the development of manufacturing industry and for the economic growth of the country. Petrochemical plants are used to convert the natural resources into the products which can be used in different applications. Ethylene, methanol, propylene, toluene, aromatics are some of the petrochemicals that are produced in these plants. Petrochemical plants are getting bigger and more complicated due to increasing operations. Many companies are using different technologies so that they can meet the challenges that are involved in building these technologies and solve them efficiently. Hitachi Ltd. announced that they have started providing their predictive maintenance service for their petrochemical plants. The company will be using different artificial intelligence (AI) technologies so that they can evaluate the working of the petrochemical plants and detect if there is any change or problem that can cause failure. This new service has the ability to collect the plant operation data and evaluate them with the help of AI based technology- adaptive resonance theory (ART) which can detect any abnormalities in the device which can cause problem that cannot be detected by any predictive maintenance system or by any normal human. They have Lamada’s AI technologies which can obtain data from actual plant operation and compare it with the category of normal data so they can analyze whether the operation is normal or not. They not check the abnormalities in single device and equipment but also make sure that it has not been spread to other equipment and devices. This new technology will improve the accuracy of the future services. This is very beneficial for the plant operator as it will decrease their workload and will also reduce the failure occurrence chances. This new predictive maintenance service has gone through a demonstration at ethylene plant in Showa Denko’s Oita Complex by Hitachi along with Showa Denko K.K. Usually, petrochemical and other plants require proper safety and maintenance for proper functioning. It is the work of the operator to manage the whole system and to ensure that all the devices and equipment in the plants are working properly. So, the plant monitoring is usually dependent upon the skills and expertise of the operator. So, to reduce the workload of operator, Hitachi’s new predictive maintenance technology is using different operational technology and artificial technology so that they can quickly detect the sign of any changes or abnormalities in the petrochemical plant. This new technology also has the ability to detect coking which is the major cause for the plant failure. It was successfully able to detect the sign of coking when it was used in the ethylene plant in Showa Denko. This new service is very useful for the manufacturer as it will change the traditional operation monitoring into advanced monitoring which will reduce the operation cost and will also decrease the ratio of plant failure.
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