iot industry 4.0 concept,industrial engineer using software (augmented, virtual reality) in tablet to monitoring machine in real time.Smart factory use Automation robot arm in automotive manufacturing
The Gulf Coast's petrochemical corridor may seem far from Silicon Valley, but on the cutting edge of industrial applications for new technologies, experts see a fruitful marriage on the horizon.
"As we continue to invest in the Gulf Coast, our competitive advantage comes from enhanced information technology," said Travis Fuller, North American polypropylene growth venture executive for ExxonMobil. "The application of tools such as virtual reality training modules will allow us to construct, operate and maintain facilities with greater efficiency, all while operating at higher safety and reliability levels than ever before."
Fuller said early on in ExxonMobil's polypropylene expansion in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, "the project adopted a new technology that we think will give us a competitive advantage with the venture, and it's virtual reality."
"We took this virtual reality and tied it together with our 3-D model of the facility, and it gave us the opportunity to look at things like constructability, the maintenance of the equipment, and ingress and egress points in case we had an emergency -- before we even engineered the site and long before we will buy the equipment and bring it to site," Fuller explained at the TEC Next Conference held recently in Baton Rouge. "With that virtual reality, we can simulate lifting equipment before it even arrives on-site. That's going to make for a much more efficient construction project and a higher-quality installation of that equipment."
Fuller stressed that projects like ExxonMobil's polypropylene expansion in Baton Rouge will only become more crucial to global standards of living as the world population continues to increase.
"The population is growing rapidly. Over the next 20 years into 2040, there will be 9 billion people on our planet," he said. "That's the equivalent of growing a new U.S. population every four years.
"And the middle class is growing faster than that, so today we have about 3 billion people in the middle class, and in 2040, we'll have 6 billion."
Travis Fuller, North American polypropylene growth venture executive for ExxonMobil.
What these rising figures mean for industry here on the Gulf Coast and around the world, Fuller said, is that energy and manufacturing demand will only increase in the foreseeable future.
"The industries that will fuel this global growth are the industries we have right here in the greater Baton Rouge area -- the petrochemical industry, a growing technology industry -- and if these industries are going to take advantage of this growth and be competitive in a global marketplace, they're going to have to invest heavily in the technologies being designed and developed," Fuller explained. "That means we have to have a public policy that supports that investment, and it also means we have to train and develop a different type of worker -- a worker who can adapt, apply that technology and thrive in a high-tech workspace."
ExxonMobil's Baton Rouge polypropylene growth project is an excellent example of this cutting-edge training in action, Fuller said.
"On a project in the real world, you get one shot," he stated. "But in the virtual world, we can simulate things like a load shift, different rigging configurations, wind-speed change -- and we can do it over and over again until we know we can do it as efficiently and safely as it can possibly be done.
"Beyond the construction ... [in] training modules for the maintenance and operations personnel, we can take them through their critical tasks in an immersive learning environment, so we can have our operators and maintenance technicians experience the startup, the operation, the shutdown, the maintenance of our equipment -- before we ever build the site.
"If you haven't put the goggles on yet, maybe you should. It is a real experience."
