Smart Manufacturing: Application to an Industrial Scale Steam-methane Reformer

Manufacturing industry has witnessed a gradual transition from being a heuristic-driven labor-intensive set of processes to a sophisticated set of automation and model-driven processes where each operation unit in the production chain is automatically controlled and operated at a preset optimum regime. While incremental improvements in overall manufacturing efficiency have been steered by advances in computational algorithms, many of these enterprises, however, can still be characterized as being a collection of ‘islands of automation’ and being ‘rich in data but poor in knowledge’. This can be attributed to sub-optimal usage of available process data and neglect of enterprise-wide analysis. There are several systemic factors which contribute to such myopic treatment of manufacturing operations. In addition, other factors have kept medium and small-scale manufacturers from leveraging even the currently available automation tools. In this paper, we explore these factors in the context of smart manufacturing (SM) as a vehicle for a paradigm shift in the manufacturing industry. A case application of SM in a hydrogen manufacturing plant as an industrial example is presented where integrated use of advanced sensors, high-fidelity and reduced-order models, high performance computing, and data management and visualization tools paved the way for plant-wide energy usage reduction.