2024 SS awards safety innovation

The EIGA Safety Innovation Award recognises best health and safety practices and is intended to encourage EIGA member companies to look to promote best practice, learn and adopt new ideas that benefit their business, the health and safety of their employees, contractors and customers and the communities they work in.

This year's winner is "Handling by robot and cobot in specialty filling plant" by SIAD.

The move towards automation in manufacturing is irreversible and our industry must move in the same direction. Going down the road of automation in manufacturing is an essential part if we want to introduce the use of artificial intelligence in our companies and reap the productivity and safety benefits that will follow. The problem that needs to be addressed is the lack of suitable tools and software on the market that can be directly used in the gas sector and, in particular, in the special gases sector. The path to automation therefore requires a special effort on the part of companies that must, therefore, use their own internal resources for this part of the design.

SIAD has designed and built a plant for the production of mixtures in the field of special gases capable of filling mixtures with many components, even at low concentrations, into many types of cylinders. The plant can also perform the prefilling operation. The entire cycle is carried out by robot and cobot without any human intervention, allowing the operator to remain in the control room.

The benefits of a fully automated system are twofold: safety and labour optimisation.

As far as safety is concerned, the obvious advantage is that the operators are physically far away from the cylinder handling and filling activities. As far as work optimisation is concerned, once the software has been coded, the fully automatic system makes it possible to improve the repeatability and reproducibility of operations. This complex software is also the basis for the use of artificial intelligence, which can bring further benefits in terms of safety. In fact, artificial intelligence is capable of managing a very large number of parameters to be used in subsequent decisions to better assist humans in making the best decisions.

The use of automation and artificial intelligence can therefore help reduce costs and, above all, improve safety.