Below I will attempt to describe the requirements of a dream I have, ever since participating in my first Process Hazard Analysis as a chemical engineer. Every engineer involved in new building of chemical processes, whether brownfield or greenfield, would benefit from something powered by machine learning and AI-based tools (databases and information being automatically updated and fields being pre-populated). Since in the field, there are a limited number of potential scenarios involved, the process could in theory become programmatic. The intention therefore would be to lighten the cognitive load for engineers tired of sitting in a room for 3-5 days with a team of 7+ subject matter experts, taking them all away from their day-to-day tasks for far too long, positing what the potential hazards/risks with a particular unit operation may or may not be, and ease the discussion of said hazards.
I dream of a future with an AI-powered software that is smart, adaptable, and can read in process safety information, whether it be process and instrumentation diagrams, process control narratives, standard operating procedures, process flow diagrams, line/piping diagrams, specifications of equipment and their operating manuals, and more, in order to more easily culminate the safe operating limits and potential failure modes and other necessary information, right at the fingertips of a subject matter expert level process safety engineer. This dream came to me not overnight, but as I started working this past year more and more with ChatGPT in order to teach me new things, such as Rockwell’s ladder logic. I was surprised by how much information the computer appeared to understand as I was learning how the process and critical safety devices were programmed in the older PLC systems which the plant I was at was operating with. Another thing I learned this year as I partnered with ViridisChem, was the ability to pull living databases from many different sources and automatically update. This would be able to be leveraged into a key feature of the software – something that can suggest mean time between failure (MTBF) and chemical compatibility information (highly corrosive materials vs. carbon steel, for example) and even pulling pump and blower information from different company websites in order to better achieve the necessary process information and estimates handed to a process safety engineer from a senior process design engineer. The program could end up being quite massive of an undertaking, so putting together a team of interested parties is the first step to achieving this. I have been a project manager on highly critical projects before and one of the great honors of my career is to work with excellent professionals who care deeply about accuracy, correctness, and solving real-world problems that are faced in legacy industry.
This dream is possible, so I am on the lookout for a software architect looking to take on a challenging new problem presented by industry, mandated by the authorities for every new process/upgrade, in order to beat out the current lackluster competition that does not utilize all the new capabilities of artificial intelligence. This dream is possible, it should be alive and evolving as I still work through some of the details on my side, study the existing process hazard analysis software market, and I am agnostic as to who may create the software first.
Below is a series of messages I shared with a fellow member on the r/AGI Subreddit this morning – a potentially interested party, looking to better understand this challenge. Some of the musings make sense only in the context of our messages, but I wish to try to elaborate more on this idea as my understanding of software limitations and capabilities evolve.
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<begin message>
SWE: hey mate
hope youre doing well
Devin: Hi, doing well, seeing dinosaurs at the Field Museum in Chicago today!
How’s stuff? Tell me a bit about you. I have 7 years in engineering so overall I’m new but the idea I have is something I been cooking in my mind for awhile, at least from the user point of view. We could chat about it more and see if it’s something attainable, or if there is more suitable people to connect with to get this sort of work evolved to the point of usability for industrial equipment.
I worked at a chemical company that had tanks that were built in 1955 and a majority of the processing equipment was from 1975 … but at least I had all of the information very well organized because over those years the engineers had improved the accuracy of that information overtime. We had to install a new ventilation system for the refinery because the old one was undersized, and having some sort of PHA software would have made that last a lot less time, and would have reduced the amount of brain power required. At the end of a PHA most people just sleep for a whole day because the brain is completely tired thinking through every possible safety concern, and it causes a lot of stress in some scenarios where there is a critical process. That’s why it takes such a large team of humans. Something I know about artificial intelligence is that it may not be perfect, but it does do a lot of basic things very well and can reduce the cognitive load for humans who are using it to assist them to make good decisions about the chemical plant they are designing. So I’ve been either running startups or working in non profits for most of my career.
SWE: My primary expertise is with react, nest js, dot net and computer vision.
Devin: That’s awesome. I wish there were more startups in my field of study! Though this idea is basically to make an AI-powered PHA Pro nemesis. PHA Pro is fine, but there are ways it could be improved and this is such a conservative field slow to change that there is a legitimate chance to dethrone the kings. Now that I’m currently not working at a company, I do not have access to a copy of PHA pro but I can see if I can find one on the dark web somewhere .
SWE: Lemme look around too
I feel like it’s a very archaic type of a software
My father’s a chemical engineer so I’ve been taught about processing stuff against my will lol.
Ive been working on software for about 5 to 6 years now.
Devin: Gotcha! I’m not so sure which type of programming language would be best for this type of program… and even if you can answer that question for me, we can bring the idea forward to somebody who does know how to program in that language.. I am so much of a noob when it comes to programming. But the good thing about this type of software is that they’re only a limited number of amount of dangers, warnings, caution, and other hazards to keep in mind when deal dealing with these chemicals. They can be a little bit difficult to think through. In my experience, typically a process hazard analysis takes like 3 to 5 days of time for a whole team of people consisting of around 7 to 10 people from the plant, which is crazy , but it must be done in order to ensure that any modifications or new chemical processes are able to be performed safely with low risk to human health and happiness.
Here in USA it is mandatory, and mandatory means money.
4:51am by the way 😴
SWE: So I reckon PHA Pro used some sort of linear programming techniques?
Yeah I was wondering why were you up so late. I have colleagues in USA and Canada and they wake up in about 4 more hours
Devin: We might have to answer that question in early research. I can find out. See I am silly. You’re not the first person that I’ve approached with this idea or request , it’s something that I always bring up to anyone who’s interested in AI. There was a guy who worked for Nvidia as an ambassador for Finland who I met in San Jose, California, and I brought the idea up to him, but it doesn’t seem like he was very interested in it because even after I added him on LinkedIn and we connected he was more interested in video games than software for chemical industry.
I live in Chicago! 🙂
SWE: From my experience, programming languages doesn’t really matter at all. What matters is how efficiently we can cover the customers needs. Basically every language is good enough, specially on systems that doesn’t require scaling. But the availability on libraries that’ll ease the process matters a lot more. If we wanna take an AI route, python will likely be a must. It’s not the best in terms of performance, but it’ll get the job done.
Personally im interested in anything that i would see as an engineering challenge 🙂
Devin: Customer requirement is maybe to assist, but still require subject matter expert to evaluate the severity and frequency of the danger, with some guidance on where to find such information (available in industry database). Something that AI is very good is pulling information from databases. I had a free trial of a software called ViridusChem which was for the physical and chemical properties of lots of different chemicals. It could actively updated database. I could ask that development team how they worked with that. I say this because one of the necessities for the program would be to help to look through the process flow diagram and assess whether chemicals are compatible with each other . It’s a simple function, but if it’s something that is automated by this program, it will be impressive to people. Another one would be to check for reaction chemistry, and whether or not something is likely to be a runaway reaction or some sort of dangerous reaction that causes a potential fire like a lithium converting to oxygen and causing a lithium fire like the ones that happen in Tesla cars!
Another challenge would be to be able to tell when there is some sort of rotating equipment danger, such as a large pump that needs to be rated for a particular area. In the USA, there are hazardous area ratings according to CSA, FM and other insurance company standards. Endress+Hauser is the company that I used to work for and they make process instrumentation equipment. That help helps to measure all of the variables like temperature and pressure and flow rate. Knowing that you would have a process that has some dangers being able to suggest, adding additional process instrumentation to measure those dangers so that they can be adequately controlled by a control system is another major hurdle that would be in this type of program.
SWE: when i meant like customers needs, what i meant like more of the features of the software. ive found that when a project is approached from a software engineering perspective, it almost always fails because SEs tend to think too much about “clean code” or “customizability” or some other things that doesnt really matter to the customers. Im guilty of this sometimes too. If the customer needs a hammer, no need to build a multitool right 😂This sounds very very interesting
So there’s a lot of available information out there. but the software is really not using it?
Devin: There are so many different modules that I can think of so far but this is the way that PHA is done. Piece by piece until all of the potential dangers have been looked into with the assistance of software. Things that are too hot next to things that have a low flammability. Things that are too cold, where the material of the pipe would crack.
SWE: cuz from the looks of it, it needs data to be inputted and it just does processing?
Devin: At the moment, most companies do a PHA by leveraging an extremely long Excel file and ranking dangers from one to five in frequency and severity, and then coming up with a mitigation method based on that. Typically a basic PHA will not require something called double Jeopardy, which is the possible failure mode and effects analysis of multiple devices on the same process line, but for some critical applications, these types of things must be considered so that engineers know whether or not to add multiple controlling redundant systems… for example a common thing to think about is whether or not a PLC or industrial computer will fail at some point in its lifetime and what the effects of that will be, and whether or not that will fail safely or if it will cause a catastrophic failure due to some other element within the chain of the process.
The data that would need to be input is called a process and instrumentation diagram, then also it process narrative or process control narrative, and finally a process flow diagram. You could look these up and get an idea of what sort of information is on them or I could tell you in very boring detail with words. They are visual diagrams that make things a lot easier to understand in the context of a chemical plant. Usually just one chemical process is covered by each. Sometimes it is a process as simple as the heating or cooling loop of a major refinery only. Sometimes it is the entire refinery battery all on one enormous piece of paper.
The dream would be to leverage the power of AI machine vision to read these diagrams and pull interesting information from that even a human would not notice at first glance. Though it does require some pre-work to make sure that all of the lines are labeled, which is not always the case in my experience. Usually there is some sort of systematic name to the line that involves the line size the schedule, the material, and the numbering system.
Pipework and line, same thing. Tell your dad that chemical engineers are just fancy plumbers.
I must rest but I am very interested in shopping around this type of program or idea or partnering up with someone who can help me make it happen! We all have dreams. I don’t currently work, hoping to get a job with Henkel Corp coming up soon in Sustainability Engineering, but my process safety experience and project management has put me on several committees to run PHA analysis… and every chemical engineer everywhere wishes that they could have those 3 to 5 days back of their life. I think that is something that could be limited to one and a half days or one day and those chemical engineers could go back to doing their critical emergency work putting out fires on a day-to-day basis rather than spending so much time worrying about things that haven’t even been built yet. I believe it has an extremely strong business case and approving track record of being a software used in the industry. It just has to be a better software than PHA pro and let me find you a copy somewhere coming up this week. Unfortunately, today I have to fix my BMW because it broke again for the 10th time . 🥲
Thanks for listening to these ideas because they’re a little bit crazy but also a little bit very good.
I would be honored to meet you! https://www.linkedin.com/in/devin-friske
That’s the real me!
🙂
LOL
Devin: Right now, I don’t have the software features in mind, but I have the deeper customer requirements based on chemical engineering principles, and safety principles… so I will start to think about what the software itself might want to look like or how the user interface might look in the back and what the types of logic that might be required could be potentially. I initially got this idea when I was using ChatGPT and deep seek to help me to understand Rockwell ladder logic based on images of the latter logic itself I was very surprised at how good it was at taking guesses at things that I didn’t even know what they meant that were Abbreviations of some standard industry terms that the AI was able to pull from the Internet.. and all sorts of guesses at the names of variables that have been named by somebody 20 to 40 years ago. 90% of projects in the USA are built on what’s called Brownfield construction, which means that they are on existing sites with information that goes back all the way to when the process was originally built.
I worked at a chemical company that had tanks that were built in 1955 and a majority of the processing equipment was from 1975 … but at least I had all of the information very well organized because over those years the engineers had improved the accuracy of that information overtime. We had to install a new ventilation system for the refinery because the old one was undersized, and having some sort of PHA software would have made that last a lot less time, and would have reduced the amount of brain power required. At the end of a PHA most people just sleep for a whole day because the brain is completely tired thinking through every possible safety concern, and it causes a lot of stress in some scenarios where there is a critical process. That’s why it takes such a large team of humans. Something I know about artificial intelligence is that it may not be perfect, but it does do a lot of basic things very well and can reduce the cognitive load for humans who are using it to assist them to make good decisions about the chemical plant they are designing.
I guess that is also something that could be included is if you have diagrams or manuals and specification sheet sheets for all of the equipment that is in the plant.. some sites are very good at this and some are horrible at this, but it could be a new standard to set that every single piece of equipment needs to have a digital copy of the troubleshooting manual, the spec sheet/cutsheet (for a motor it’s pump curve) the operating manual and even more. I guess of major categories of hazards in this context are chemical hazards, rotating equipment hazards and pinch points, high temperature, hazards, and high pressure hazards, confined space hazards, flammability concerns, chemical reaction hazards…. And many others… there is a good reason these take a long time to complete even for the smartest people in the room.
SWE: gotchu. This is very interesting. Lemme just do a bit of research and if i can get my hands on the software i can look into this more thoroughly. I think ML can help a lot here cuz there seems to be a lot of data around this that we can work out. I’m working out on my application for a higher position too these days. If you have any material send my way. I’ll have a look. I sent you a follow.
SWE: my names _______. my linkedin hasnt been updated in some time. My organization recruits internally so kinda not a lot of need to showcase what I do.
Devin: OK, I will have to try to find some examples of chemical or industry databases for you that information can be pulled from. One such database would be the meantime before failure, which is something which I believe can be found in AICHE CCPS (Center for Chemical Process Safety) on their website… CCPS is the main driver for PHA requirement in the USA. They certified process safety professionals so it could be recommended that the subject matter expert must have CCPSC (certification) in order to do a four eyes validation on whatever the output of the machine might be. I agree that this will definitely benefit from machine learning in order to understand how to read in the information from the databases, but it also will require some other clever elements and I don’t have enough knowledge within making computer programs yet, but I think the more that we talk the more clarification could come out of it. Some interesting links:
1. https://www.aiche.org/ccps/resources/certified-process-safety-professional
2. CCPSC: CCPS Process Safety Professional Certification
3. www.aiche.org •Grounded in real-world experience. Administered independently. Respected industry-wide.
4. https://www.aiche.org/ccps/resources/process-equipment-reliability-database-perd
5. https://www.aiche.org/resources/publications/books/guidelines-process-equipment-reliability-data-data-tables
6. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/285381549_CCPS_Generic_Failure_Rate_Data_Base
SWE: honestly, dont think too much about what’s possible on software side. Basically go wild with what you think has to be done. Then we can figure out what’s doable and not. 99% its doable
ive only said its impossible to one guy, a ceo in sri lanka who wanted to integrate real time hardware based audio translation. its not possible cuz of physics. and different languages having different structures which makes it 100% impossible
Devin: That makes sense. When in the brainstorming phase, it’s time to dream big. I will see what I can come up with. I’m writing a blog post right now on my website devinfriske.com to help me to help other people understand what my requirements might be for this type of software… I’m sort of agnostic as to who would be able to create the software, but to have this sort of idea that would move industry forward is a big enough driver and motivator for me.
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