August 24, 2022 • 3 min read
How an evergreen digital twin can unlock lifetime plant value
We helped one of the world’s largest plastics, chemicals and refining companies to improve plant efficiency and harvest savings through the implementation of a digital twin.
Picture this, you own and operate one of the world’s largest propylene oxide and tertiary butyl alcohol plant in the world. It’s your biggest investment yet and is enormous in scale, with a footprint spanning over 16 square kilometers.
The size, complexity, and societal pressure through the need for cleaner chemicals, means it’s a vital challenge to get right. So how do you enable the most cost-effective and efficient design and construction of your facility and deliver the most sustainable operations for the duration of the plant’s life?
It’s the question our customer asked us to help find the answer to.
A streamlined approach through digital integration
Our recommendation was to implement a suite of digital tools including a digital twin during engineering, procurement, and construction. The goal was to simplify processes and capture the value of asset data across the entire plant. Enabling a seamless data flow from design and construction into operations and maintenance.
“With any digital implementation, it’s normal to meet challenges that aren’t initially accounted for. Given the extensive scope and complexity of this facility, we knew a flexible and adaptable approach would be needed. As we evaluated how and where a digital twin would best fit, scope definitions changed several times. With that, our solution for implementing and hosting the digital twin changed too,” says Tedd Weitzman, Senior Advisor, Customer Solutions.
“We’d been working with our customer since 2017, not just on digital tools but providing engineering services, too. With this understanding of the plant and our strong relationship, we worked through the development journey together to create a concept that ultimately delivered on what we originally set out to do.”
The team introduced a digital twin that integrated with design and project management tools, making documentation available in one place to all plant staff and inspectors.
“This allowed us to automate manual tasks and accelerate others that previously took days to complete to a matter of hours. Through our work, our customer identified substantial savings in the design phase alone,” says Weitzman.
But we had to keep in mind how this data and the running of the digital twin would transition when the project entered its operations and maintenance phase later the following year.
A digital future for a working chemicals plant
“We created a centralized, evergreen source of system information that keeps engineering data up to date for the lifetime of the plant. This unlocks a value that would have been lost if the digital twin was decommissioned after the build phase,” says Weitzman. “This is common on large projects when consideration isn’t always given to the future functioning and value proposition of the twin.”
Our customer has benefitted from savings in time and cost already through the implementation of its current digital twin. With our industry expertise and familiarization of the project through being part of the engineering of the facility, it trusts us to deliver a safe and seamless transition of the tool.
The operation of the plant will be handed over to the customer and its partners. The living digital ecosystem of the full plant’s data will remain on our cloud servers and be continuously monitored and maintained by our experts.
“This is where our customer will truly realize the benefit of having full access to its data at its fingertips,” says Weitzman “To enable better decision making and increase overall operational efficiency.”
