The importance of petrochemicals continues to grow. Demand for plastics – the most familiar group of petrochemical products – has outpaced that of all other bulk materials (such as steel, aluminium or cement), and has nearly doubled since 2000. This increased demand and focus on clean energy has forced the petrochemical industry to adapt and find new ways of increasing production through innovation.
Automating labour intensive processes is one way in which Astech can assist the major oil and gas companies increase their production yield. As with other chemical related industries such as Pharmaceutical, Cosmetics and Consumer Goods, the petrochemical industry utilises High Throughput Experimentation (HTE) and High Throughput Formulation Science (HTFS). In HTE for example, automated platforms and robotics are often used to carry out a large number of experiments simultaneously or in a highly efficient manner. Researchers can vary reaction conditions, catalysts, reactants, or other parameters to quickly identify optimal conditions or discover novel reactions. Astech can assist by designing and building these unique, bespoke automated systems that can carry out these laboratory workflows more productively and efficiently with little need for manual intervention. In addition, process pressure and temperature can be potentially hazardous and therefore the use of automation ensures a safer working environment that frees up scientists to work on value added research and development tasks.
Astech have various products adaptable for the Petrochemical industry, from LabExpert®: a scheduling software which is designed to enhance the efficiency of laboratory processes, to the Robotic Lab Assistant: a self-driving autonomous mobile robot integrated with a safe, collaborative 6-axis robotic arm and state of the art 3D machine vision for navigation and localisation.
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