New requirements will inevitably lead to the transformation and upgrading of the industry. As a traditional industry, the transformation of the petrochemical industry should not only involve products and production process routes, but more importantly, the transformation of the production management level, which should adopt more “advancing with The Times” means and methods, such as digital and intelligent technology. Therefore, the application of digital intelligence to factory management and integrated management will bring major changes to the industry. Use digital technology to continuously improve the automation level of plants and factories, accelerate the digitization process of enterprises, in order to comprehensively improve the level of production efficiency, production lean management, precise carbon emission monitoring and enterprise management.

In this context, we need to seize the opportunity to speed up exploration and practice, but the transformation and upgrading is not achieved overnight, and we need to constantly update and iterate, and continue to improve with the development of digitalization and intelligence.

UNC4672A V1 HIEE205012R1 HI220957-31239

UNC4672A V1 HIEE205012R1 HI220957-31239

Dual skills integration and strong cooperation

New challenges, new technological advances, and new conceptual changes make the topic of building a smart factory in the petrochemical industry more complex and rich. Among them, as a key investment process in China’s petrochemical industry, propane dehydrogenation (PDH) can be described as a microcosm of the entire petrochemical industry. Liu Maoshu pointed out that the white paper released this time expounds the trend of digital transformation of the process industry represented by petrochemical, and details the benchmark case of propane dehydrogenation (PDH) smart factory jointly built with Shenghong Petrochemical from the dimensions of goals, practice paths, construction results and benefits. Honeywell demonstrated a number of mature intelligent solutions and technology applications covering all aspects of manufacturing.

Shenghong Petrochemical and Honeywell have been discussing for two years how to achieve digitalization and intelligence in Chinese petrochemical enterprises. Since 2021, Honeywell has carried out comprehensive and in-depth cooperation with Shenghong Petrochemical in smart factory and advanced control around the propane dehydrogenation unit, thus launching the intelligent transformation and planning of Shenghong Petrochemical.

Through the provision of UOP interconnection services, Advanced control system (APC), intelligent production management execution system (Honeywell MES), process alarm management, carbon emission monitoring and other digital technologies, Honeywell has helped Shenghong Petrochemical to secure the industry leading position in plant performance, production cost, and key indicators of carbon emissions. Transform the traditional operation management concept of the plant, achieve cost reduction and efficiency, excellent operation, and create a cooperation model of smart factories in the propane dehydrogenation industry. On this basis, we summarize these practices into a white paper that is more relevant to the actual operation of the enterprise, showing the entire process from hardware to software to management process improvement.