Solugen, a specialty chemicals manufacturer and industrial microscope developer Nanotronics are partnering to build AI into chemical production processes to reduce chemical contamination. The technology brings the prospect of smaller autonomous chemical plants closer. 

The collaboration will incorporate Nanotronics’ proprietary Intelligent Factory Control during the production process, and comes in the midst of a two year pilot programme aimed at enabling autonomous chemical plants for Solugen, powered by Nanotronics.

Founded in 2016, Solugen produces bio-based solutions. The company’s first product, Bioperoxide, was created using patented enzymatic technology to convert plant sugars into hydrogen peroxide and led to the manufacturing of a comprehensive line of products such as its BioSol and ScavSol solutions. BioSol and ScavSol help treat, clean and oxidise water uses with oil and gas, waste-water treatment and mining chemicals. 

Solugen’s solutions remove the need for highly combustible and toxic petrochemical-based chemicals to clean water as its products are more efficacious, cheaper, safer to produce, and less hazardous for customers and their employees as well as fully biodegradable. This process in concert with use of Nanotronics’ Intelligent Factory Control, reduces waste from the factory itself.

Intelligent Factory Control uses Artificial Intelligence to continuously monitor the production of Solugen products and through reinforcement learning agents, is able to determine whether there are anomalies in the process that are too subtle for humans or traditional control systems to detect. It works inline and defects or anomalies are discovered as they happen, as opposed to further along in the production process, preventing expensive backtracking.

“This is an industrial vigilance that doesn’t exist within chemical plants currently and with Nanotronics technology, we are able to detect irregularities and autonomously correct the production process in real-time,” said Gaurab Chakrabarti, M.D., PhD, and co-founder and CEO of Solugen, Inc. “Our current data gathered from the pilot programme and the added security measure baked within the production process brings our vision of smaller, autonomous chemical plants, closer to reality.”

“Sophisticated attacks, or even subtle process variations, have been incredibly challenging to identify even when using the most advanced production protocols. Using AI in this manner will provide a higher level of quality and safety,” said Matthew Putman, CEO and cofounder of Nanotronics. “I applaud Solugen for being the first to address this issue using advanced biology.”