"How They Made it Work" is a column that features some of the latest technological advancements in the chemical process industry. Here, Chemical Processing asks experts from various technology providers to provide insight into their innovations and how they're helping chemical manufacturers operate their plants more efficiently and effectively.
Company
Cognite
Technology
Cognite Data Fusion is an industrial DataOps software designed to enable quick deployment of a contextualized data foundation for rapid scaling of digital solutions. DataOps is the ability to enact solutions, develop data products and activate data for business value across all technology tiers from infrastructure to experience.
The software has been designed to offer asset-heavy industries a more scalable and sustainable approach to industrial data management by putting data directly into the hands of experts, engineers and data scientists.
Significance in chemical plants
Cognite Data Fusion combines DataOps and artificial intelligence to provide predictive maintenance insights. This can help engineers address vulnerabilities and underlying issues, strengthening equipment reliability. While it’s important to know that technology like this can’t prevent damage from extreme weather like a hurricane, it gives facilities and equipment the best chance at being prepared for a disaster.
Creating shutdown plans is only made possible by having all data consolidated and contextualized. Oftentimes, industrial data is siloed and scattered, meaning it’s available but useless. By bringing the data into one place and simplifying it, all experts can collaborate and craft shutdown plans or quickly adapt those already existing for any emergency situations.
Unique features
Along with predictive maintenance helping to better prepare equipment, Cognite Data Fusion helps to enhance the resilience of chemical manufacturing facilities in a few ways:
- Contextualized data: Because many manufacturing facilities have been built or expanded over time, they typically have a mix of old and new equipment working together. In this case, AI helps contextualize and bring all the equipment data together rather than having each data set siloed into different unrelated data repositories.
- Planning for maintenance: AI can also offer a better understanding of how much maintenance is needed and when to conduct it across a facility. For example, depending on the maintenance that needs to be done, it may be in the facility’s best interest profit-wise to have a full shutdown for a short period and do all of the repairs at once. However, in other cases, doing individual repairs as needed could make more sense. Understanding this type of data and insights can be the difference of tens of millions of dollars for facilities.
Success story
Celanese, a chemical manufacturer, was looking for a platform that would enable the broad data accessibility, standardization and automation that is crucial to accelerate solution development in an open environment. Celanese used the Cognite Data Fusion platform at its Clear Lake, Texas, facility to build an integrated manufacturing portal that serves as a single source of information for all of its domain experts. This integrated portal includes digital twin technology, no-code data analytics and robotics to democratize data access and make real-time assets more easily discoverable to the Celanese team. Since the integration, Celanese has:
- Improved visibility, collaboration and compliance
- Improved tracking and trending of historical data
- Reduced time spent on data discovery and analysis
As Celanese moves into the next phase of its digitalization journey with Cognite, the company aims to implement solutions for autonomous inspection and data contextualization, operationalize high-impact use cases, expand these solutions globally, and replicate successful practices across its manufacturing facilities.
