Exploration of Design, Manufacture and Maintenance of Pressure Vessels in China Under Background of the Internet

Abstract

Abstract Pressure vessel is a kind of high-end equipment with a large quantity and wide applications, showing the potential hazard of leakage and explosion. In the past decade, the Chinese government has put forward clear requirements for the digitalization, networking and intelligentization of high-end equipment manufacturing under background of the Internet. Since the beginning of this century, Chinese scientific and technical workers have carried out engineering practice and exploration in the design, manufacturing and maintenance of pressure vessels based on life-cycle risk control in view of the prominent problems of high failure probability and many explosion accidents in China. The problems have been basically solved including the complex failure modes identification, inspection and monitoring, safety diagnosis and failure prevention under the extreme service environment and equipment size. The experience gained from in-service inspections and failure accidents analyses has been fed back to the early stage of pressure vessel design and manufacturing. The technical system of risk-based pressure vessel design, manufacturing and maintenance has been established. The standardization, softwareization and digitalization of the structural design, manufacturing process optimization and risk assessment of pressure vessels have been preliminarily realized, and good results have been achieved. However, in the face of the long-term safety service requirements of important pressure vessels in the development and utilization of new energy in the future, there are still problems such as unclear failure modes of some equipment, insufficient collaborative risk control of pressure vessels due to insufficient information and data interconnection in the optimization of material properties, manufacturing process, inspection, operation and maintenance. In this paper, it is proposed to develop an integrated cloud service platform in China for risk-based pressure vessel design, manufacturing and maintenance around 2025. A unified database architecture and risk influencing factors knowledge base will be established. The application problems of key technologies will be broken through such as cross-stage risk identification and control, cross-software multi-source heterogeneous data fusion, microservice architecture design, generative design, and digital twins in pressure vessels. The cloud service platform will integrate the services such as risk assessment, structural design, strength analysis, safety diagnosis, remaining life prediction, generative design, and digital twins, etc. It will provide support for the safe, green and intelligent development of high-end pressure vessels in the process industries.