Title : The contribution of immersive technologies in novel industrial catalytic processes
Abstract:
Laboratories and institutes usually consume resources for further studying novel catalytic reactions and not so much for scaling them up into industrial catalytic processes and training professionals to use them. On the other hand, chemical industry keens on turnkey solutions. The main scope of this study is to examine the twofold contribution of immersive technologies in scaling-up novel catalytic processes in the chemical industry, as well as the professional training and certification of staff for using them. Hence, a novel application of heterogenized homogeneous catalysis applied on the neuralgic sector of energy was thoroughly examined taking into advantage its pioneering benefit that is the efficient and convenient recovering of the catalyst. Firstly, a laboratory research of the catalytic process took place. Then, the chemical catalytic process was modelled, simulated, verified, validated and tested with proper feedback from the laboratory experiments. In the next step, immersive technologies were used in order to create a virtual reality environment of the real field as well as a virtual control room environment for supervisory, control and data acquisition of the chemical process. Subsequently, an in-situ training and assessment process of the chemical industry staff occurred on virtual reality high tech facilities interacting with emergency what-if scenarios, which were not hypothetical or fiction products, but rather the result of long-term interviews with industry executives, field operators and control room operators in order to reproduce accurately, efficiently and effectively near-misses, dangerous incidents and accidents. Consequently, a ready-to-use environment for the chemical industry was designed and developed.
Audience take away:
- Heterogenizing homogeneous catalysts and taking advantage of their pioneering benefits.
- Modeling and simulating of novel chemical process with complicated substances for an effective scale-up study, training and assessment procedure.
- Verifying, validating and testing of the chemical process model.
- Applying immersive technologies in industrial catalysis.
