News Information

With the rapid development of digital technology, the digital transformation of petrochemical equipment has become a key path to enhance production efficiency and ensure safe production. At the recently held 2025 National Conference on Automation, Intelligence and Equipment Transformation in the Petrochemical Industry, experts pointed out that digital technology has currently covered all aspects of petrochemical equipment from production to operation and maintenance. In the future, it is still necessary to further integrate data and establish high-quality databases to promote the petrochemical industry to truly move towards an intelligent manufacturing future.

Li Aojie, the vice president of marketing at Zhejiang Linuo Fluid Control Technology Co., LTD., pointed out that in recent years, there have been many outdated equipment and facilities in China's oil and petrochemical industry, which has posed a severe challenge to the intrinsic safety of enterprises. To address this issue, in 2024, seven departments including the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology jointly issued the "Implementation Plan for Promoting Equipment Renewal in the Industrial Sector", explicitly stating the need to promote the safety transformation of old petrochemical and chemical facilities, and taking digital transformation and intelligent upgrading as key directions. This is not only an important deployment of the national strategy, but also an inevitable choice for enterprises to achieve sustainable development. He said.

It is reported that currently, digital technology has covered all links from production to operation and maintenance of petrochemical equipment, demonstrating diversified application scenarios and profoundly changing the production mode of the petrochemical industry.

In terms of production, digital transformation not only enhances production efficiency but also significantly improves product performance. In recent years, Chongqing Chuanyi Automation Co., LTD., as a leading domestic instrument enterprise, has developed many products that have broken the foreign technological monopoly. Ren Tao, the deputy general manager of Sichuan Instrument Measurement and Control Technology Branch, introduced that this is attributed to the company's emphasis on technological innovation on the one hand, and also relies on the in-depth application of digital technology on the other.

At present, Chuan Yi has built 4 smart factories, 7 digital workshops and 46 digital production lines, achieving unmanned operation throughout the entire process from design to production. In the circuit board production workshop, workers only need to scan the code to complete all the processes, and the quality data is automatically uploaded to the cloud. On the pressure transmitter assembly line, robots complete the entire process from component grasping to finished product testing, minimizing manual intervention. According to statistics, the application of digital technology has reduced the proportion of enterprise management personnel to below 10% and increased production efficiency by more than 30%.

Jiangsu Huaying Valve Industry Co., Ltd. has built a large number of CNC machining lathes and ERP manufacturing resource integrated management systems by applying the latest computer technology. Moreover, all the data among Huaying's factories are interconnected and shared through optical cables, effectively concentrating manufacturing resources, improving production efficiency, and also enhancing processing quality and process control. Its ball valves, gate valves, globe valves, check valves and butterfly valves and other products are widely used in various harsh working conditions and high-demand industries such as oil, natural gas, oil refining, chemical engineering and long-distance pipelines around the world.

For the application end of petrochemical equipment, digitalization is an even more "compulsory question".

"Instrumentation equipment is the 'nerve endings' for the safe operation of the petrochemical industry. Its localization and independent control are of vital importance to national strategic security." " Ren Tao stated that for the petrochemical industry to achieve digital and intelligent transformation, it cannot do without intelligent instrument equipment with high precision, high sensitivity and high reliability.

Intelligent technology is the core path to enhancing the safety and efficiency of storage and transportation. Liu Jiebo, the director of Sinopec Hunan Petrochemical Co., LTD., mentioned that Hunan Petrochemical has achieved precise identification of the oil-water interface through ultrasonic probes, eliminating the safety hazards of traditional manual dehydration. The quantitative loading system integrates a mass flowmeter and an intelligent controller, reducing the trade measurement error to below 0.2%.

In terms of equipment integrity management, Jin Tan, a senior engineer at Zhonghan (Wuhan) Petrochemical Co., LTD., pointed out that digital technology currently has four major application directions in equipment integrity management: first, achieving full life cycle management optimization; second, real-time risk control; third, the predictive maintenance revolution; and fourth, data-driven decision-making.

Director Wei Qiang of Lanzhou Petrochemical Company of China National Petroleum Corporation introduced that Lanzhou Petrochemical has established a "two-level precise inspection" system for equipment that has exceeded its service life. Through equipment classification management and the IBM equipment management system, the monitoring data has been digitized. The system can automatically screen for abnormal vibration and temperature of the equipment and issue early warnings, promoting the accuracy rate of fault diagnosis from 10% to 75%. In the future, this model will be extended to units such as Guangdong Petrochemical to facilitate the transformation of industry equipment management towards predictive maintenance.

Although significant progress has been made in the digitalization of petrochemical equipment, Jin Tan also pointed out that the industry still faces a series of challenges at present, mainly including the inability to intercommunicate data among multiple systems, the extension of business process time due to system switching, the lack of modular design, and the need for overall reconstruction of new functions.

Among them, the issue of "data silos" is frequently mentioned. Li Ao, the deputy general manager of the Industrial Intelligence Division of Anyuan Technology Co., LTD., pointed out that currently, enterprises generally use more than 15 digital systems, but the data intercommunication rate is less than 30%, which has greatly affected the digitalization process of petrochemical enterprises.

China-korea Petrochemical has developed a centralized equipment control platform, integrating the information system data of various professional equipment to comprehensively grasp the operation status of the equipment integrity system. The application of this platform has significantly enhanced the efficiency of equipment management, achieving controllable risks, process optimization, resource collaboration and rapid response, providing a referenceable experience for the digital transformation of the petrochemical industry.

Identifying core data and key parameters is more valuable than blindly pursuing big data. Wang Shaoyong from the Huizhou Refining Branch of CNOOC Refining & Chemical Co., Ltd. pointed out that data resources include both historical data and real-time data. To truly "utilize" the data, it is necessary to change the mindset, extract effective information from the production source, collect data from multiple dimensions, and build a streamlined and reliable database.

Experts attending the meeting pointed out that this transformation is not merely a simple accumulation of technologies, but a comprehensive reconstruction of production models, management thinking and industrial ecosystems. In the future, with the further improvement of the standard system and the continuous deepening of cross-border cooperation, petrochemical equipment will further take advantage of the "data" to move forward, providing solid support for the digital and intelligent transformation and high-quality development of the petrochemical industry.