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Drastic Reduction in Operator Workloads and
Faster Plant Startup and Shutdown /
Nippon Shokubai Co., Ltd.
Nippon Shokubai Co., Ltd. (Nippon Shokubai) is a leading chemical company and Japan's largest producer of acrylic acid and superabsorbent polymers. Nippon Shokubai has three factories in Japan, with consolidated annual sales of US$1.7 billion in fiscal year 2003. The company began operations in 1941 and succeeded in launching the production of phthalic anhydride on an industrial scale. Since then, it has been recognized as having the world's most advanced oxidation and catalyst technology. Its state-of-the-art acrylic acid production technology has been introduced by many major chemical manufacturing companies, and accounts for more than 50% of worldwide production.
Nippon Shokubai considered the following merits of the Exapilot operation efficiency improvement package when making this selection:
In 2001 Nippon Shokubai built a new NVP (N-vinylpyrrolidone - a raw material used in pastes and photoresist coating) plant that used state-of-the-art technology. The prestigious Chemical Engineering Magazine subsequently conferred its Kirkpatrick Honor Award upon the company in recognition of this plant's safe and clean production of NVP using an innovative vapor phase continuous reaction processes and a new dehydration catalyst.
Nippon Shokubai faced a challenge in constructing an automatic start-up and shutdown system for production processes using this plant's DCS (Distributed Control System) as the new technology used in the plant produced frequent changes in operating conditions. As the DCS was not the best platform for controlling the plant through sequence programs, the company installed Exapilot so that start-up and shutdown sequences could be automated quickly, in spite of the demanding operating conditions.
Exapilot succeeded in reducing operators' workloads dramatically at the time of plant start-up and shutdown. Before Exapilot was introduced, an operator had to constantly make manual adjustments to the DCS. Exapilot achieved a fully automatic system as follows:
Nippon Shokubai has been highly satisfied with Exapilot's contributions as follows:
SYSTEM DETAILS
System configuration: Exapilot
Procedural Automation (Exapilot) provides a flexible methodology to capture, optimize and retain procedural knowledge in a process plant while meeting requirements in reliability, flexibility, and lifecycle costs.
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