"Carbon neutrality" in industrial fires

Where does most of the "carbon" in "carbon neutrality" come from?

Today, almost everyone is talking about "carbon neutrality".

On September 13, Apple held a new product conference. At the meeting, Lisa Jackson, Apple's vice president of environmental, policy and social initiatives, once again reiterated that Apple is committed to achieving complete carbon neutrality by 2030, and the case and strap materials of Apple Watch 9 are made of renewable materials, and leather straps are no longer manufactured through Fine Woven material watches. The ninth-generation Apple Watch became the first carbon-neutral Apple product.

In addition to "carbon neutral" products, major companies have also emphasized "operational carbon neutrality" in their ESG reports. Financial markets are also promoting "carbon neutrality" – at the CIFTIS "Carbon Neutrality Action and Corporate ESG Innovation" forum held in early September, Mei Dewen, vice chairman of the Beijing Green Exchange, proposed that if China's carbon market is financialized in the future, the annual transaction volume is expected to exceed 1 trillion yuan.

However, China is actually still in the stage of growth and peaking, the time window for carbon peak and carbon neutrality is short, and the task of carbon emission reduction and achieving net-zero carbon emissions is arduous.

According to data and estimates from relevant institutions, in 2021, China's carbon emissions reached 11.89 billion tons, accounting for 32.8% of the world. Taking into account the energy transition and the decline in carbon emission intensity, it is roughly estimated that China's total net greenhouse gas emissions will be about 12.26 billion tons by 2030. This also means that in the next 30 years, China needs to reduce tens of billions of tons of net greenhouse gas emissions to zero, which is a very difficult task.

In order to truly achieve carbon neutrality, we must start with the question of "how does carbon come about".

According to Ding Zhongli, vice chairman of the National People's Congress and academician of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, released last year to deeply understand the basic logic and technical needs of carbon neutrality, China's current annual carbon dioxide emissions are about 10 billion tons, about a quarter of the world's total emissions. Of the total annual emissions of about 10 billion tons of carbon dioxide, about 4.5 billion tons are generated and heated, about 500 million tons are used in the operation of buildings after completion (mainly coal and gas), about 1 billion tons are emitted by transportation, and about 3.9 billion tons are emitted by industry. Among industrial emissions, building materials, iron and steel, chemicals and nonferrous metals are the main emission areas. Further research found that about 2.9 billion tonnes of CO2 emitted by power and heat generation should also eventually be credited to industrial emissions. In other words, China's industrial emissions account for about 68% of the total emissions, such a high proportion is unique among all major countries, which is determined by China's "world factory", in the stage of rapid urbanization development, economic and social compression development and other factors.

It is not difficult to see that starting with industrial emissions, reducing carbon emissions is the general trend.

Translating dynamic "industrial fire" into big data

Professor Li Xiaodong, founder of Fuxi Think Tank, researcher of the Institute of Computing of the Chinese Academy of Sciences and director of the Internet Governance Research Center of Tsinghua University, pointed out in his speech at the 2nd China Digital Carbon Neutrality Summit Forum that in the era of industrial economy, large-scale, standardized and low-cost assembly line production methods have many links and long chains, and the production links are relatively separated from each other, and the order delivery cycle is long, it is difficult to quickly respond to real-time changes in market demand, production and marketing are not right, and overproduction leads to waste of resources. In the era of digital economy, the integration and circulation of data elements help the production end face the consumer market, small-scale, personalized and easily adjusted intelligent manufacturing makes on-demand production and rapid response possible, deriving new models such as flexible production and incremental manufacturing, digital product design reduces carbon from the source, incremental manufacturing maximizes resource utilization, and digital control improves product qualification rate.

The technology and products of Jiangyin Youran Technology Co., Ltd. (hereinafter referred to as "Youran Technology") are like this. 36Kr learned that Founded in 2017, Youran is a scientific and technological enterprise committed to continuously improving the combustion efficiency of industrial furnaces, and its self-developed "large-vortex turbulence algorithm based on industrial Internet for efficient combustion of industrial kilns" technology application is oriented to basic industries based on gas fuel combustion, including steel, building materials, ultra-high pressure equipment manufacturing, Low-carbon digital upgrading and transformation of forging and other industries or new digital intelligent green production lines for basic industries, using industrial Internet technology to calculate and present industrial combustion dynamic parameters in real time, to achieve refined combustion, can achieve 10-40% natural gas savings, that is, this technology can help enterprises reduce carbon emissions by up to 40%.

Product diagram

Fu Yuqiang, general manager of Youran Technology and industry professor at the School of Intelligent Manufacturing of Nanjing University of Science and Technology, said that the technology uses a large-vortex turbulent combustion simulation algorithm to ensure that the flame form of the combustion system meets the process requirements, ensure that the heat is accurately delivered to the product that needs to be heated, and avoid the heat loss caused by unreasonable flame. "It can be said that we can make the optimal flame form for different processes. In other words, what we do is 'translator of industrial fire'. ”

Fu Yuqiang, General Manager of Youran Technology

In addition to making the optimal solution of the flame, the combustion system can also digitally monitor and control the entire combustion process, and the collected data can be analyzed to provide a management basis for production management.

Product diagram

36Kr learned that at present, the application of this technology has been extended to steel and deep processing, non-ferrous metals, inorganic non-metallic materials, major equipment and other fields. Mainly targeted at high-end users with specialized and special new needs, in addition to providing customers with equipment, but also including safe use training, technical consultation and lifelong cloud after-sales. Fu Yuqiang said that heating as the heart of industrial production, ensuring its 24-hour safe and stable operation has become the most basic pursuit of every project of Youran.

Fu Yuqiang said frankly that under the current economy, more and more industrial users have begun to choose to make efforts in the direction of low-carbon and digitalization to cope with multiple pressures in terms of cost, quality, labor and other aspects, and strive to achieve the specialization and new transformation of enterprises on the basis of steady development. It is worth mentioning that Youran Technology recently cooperated with a non-ferrous metal company in Apple's supply chain. It is reported that with the help of Youran Technology, the company has doubled its production, and the unit carbon emissions are only one-third to one-fifth of the previous one-third.