Smart chemical plant architecture development based on a systems engineering

Abstract

Chemical plant is a factory producing chemical goods through a continuous chemical reactions flow process in a set of equipment and apparatus. In this factory, equipment is the most crucial components in the whole life cycle of the plant encompassing planning, design, engineering, construction, commissioning, operation & maintenance (O&M) and disposal. According to the industrial statistics, cost of equipment takes over 52% of the total construction cost, and maintenance fee due to equipment failure during operation is reported over $10M, and average daily loss of $150K in some plants. The main reason for this is due to lack of data and information flow during the planning and operation stage. In other words, transparent and live information for the whole stakeholders of the chemical plant is utmost important for the chemical plant industry. In this thesis, a way of achieving such a purpose is investigated based on the technology called IoT (Internet of Things) and Smart Factory. Specifically, architecture of smart plant for chemical plant was developed based on the Systems Engineering (SE), a powerful methodology for successfully developing the complex system, involving multi-disciplinary domain and a variety of stakeholders. The developed architecture was illustrated and verified by developing a prototype for a natural gas based hydrogen generation plant. Through the prototype, the impact of the cost saving as well as information infrastructure of the developed architecture is significant. Even so, it should be verified through more industrial cases; i.e., tailoring process in the future. Considering that there is almost no work in the open literature dealing with the smart factory for continuous process plant, such as the chemical plant dealt with in the thesis, the research results will contribute in this area.