Sustainable chemistry in India fueling growth with digital and AI innovation: Revvity Signals

Even as the sector expands, Indian chemicals companies are under pressure to reduce the environmental impacts of their activities. By improving production efficiency and streamlining workflows, the industry’s leaders aim to create a more-sustainable future and are turning to the latest AI-powered analytics to drive innovation and insight.

Shifting Towards Sustainable Chemistry

Today, India is the sixth-largest chemicals producer worldwide, with an estimated market value of around $220 billion in 2023, and the chemicals industry contributes around 7% to India’s GDP.  Naturally, combined with the race for market share and new revenues, environmental standards form a central part of the sector’s business strategy, developed through regulatory pressure combined with society’s emphasis on sustainability.

For example, in India, the Extended Producer Responsibility (EPR) regulations hold chemicals companies accountable for waste production, carbon emissions and resource preservation. The Indian national policy and companies’ own efforts are aligned with global sustainability frameworks such as the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDG).  Both Indian policy and global efforts urge industries to adopt greener alternatives throughout the chemical workflow, from raw material formulation to packaging and distribution.

To meet stringent regulatory specifications, chemicals companies are prioritizing product and process innovation, looking for ways to increase efficiency, streamline processes and cut waste. For example, plants are replacing traditional petro-based feedstocks with biomass alternatives, such as changing out propylene for sucrose to derive isobutanol, to create a more sustainable product and reduce the total carbon footprint. Modifying the feedstock rather than creating a new process offers a way to meet environmental targets without radical revisions to the manufacturing infrastructure. Enhancing process efficiency attracts similar attention and interest, and innovative steps have been made in the realms of digitalization, automation, and replacing organic solvents with aqueous-based solvents, which have become known as ‘green chemistry’ techniques. The aim is to mitigate the generation of waste and identify opportunities for energy-efficient production.

However, many industrial processes will continue to rely on industrial solvents and fossil fuels for the foreseeable future, and finding greener alternatives will take substantial time and financial investment. In addition, uncertainty in the constantly changing global regulatory and political arena will tend to increase risks, inducing caution when committing significant capital budgets.

Driving Chemistry Through Digital and AI Innovation

Given such contrary pressures, there is intense interest in driving greater efficiency within existing processes, workflows and infrastructure. As an alternative to major infrastructure investments, new digital techniques – particularly those powered by AI – are emerging that can deliver enhanced efficiency, reduced waste and improved environmental performance.

For example, Chris Bishop, Technical Research Fellow at Microsoft, said in a conversation with the Financial Times’ AI editor Madhumita Murgia, “My view is that scientific discovery will prove to be the single most important application of artificial intelligence. Scientific discovery is so fundamental to human progress. It’s about gaining a better understanding of the world, in order that we can improve the human condition, whether it’s agriculture, industry, drug discovery, tackling healthcare, new forms of energy, sustainable forms of energy or tackling climate change.”

Without question, AI is already indispensable for research and development. AI-based analytics and machine learning models can predictively screen and generate recommendations for more-efficient formulations and manufacturing workflows, generating more product with less waste, and minimizing environmental impacts. In addition, leading companies are adopting real-time data analytics that optimize processes in ways that previously seemed unobtainable.

Becoming an AI-ready organization

For many companies, data is often trapped within separate systems, and workflows are either based on manual transfers from one place to another or rely on custom scripts. To maximize the opportunities offered by AI, the first step is to move R&D into the digital era, by replacing manual and spreadsheet-based processes with an integrated data platform.

Moving to a unified platform, from initial synthesis design and formulations development through to manufacturing execution, enables AI tools to be deployed to maximum effect. By collecting and curating data, a fully digital enterprise can exploit AI-powered analytics to seek new ways to optimize workflows and explore new processes that would otherwise remain hidden.

In addition, the AI capabilities will only be fully productive if they are easy to use, accessible, and deliver reliable results.

Empowering Data Transformation for Chemicals Companies

The Revvity Signals software solution, Signals One, offers a powerful specialty chemical R&D workflow designed by scientists, for scientists. It digitalizes all parts of the chemical R&D process from sourcing and planning materials to chemical synthesis, analytics and decision support. For example, through barcode scanning, its virtual inventory and materials library provides the ability to manage resources smartly, repurpose existing materials and assign critical toxicity and hazard information to each material, all within the same familiar workbench. 

Signals One by Revvity Signals addresses the limitations of previous excel-based workflows by including structured data capture, organization and analysis in a collaborative way. Featured within Signals One is a formulation library allowing chemists to capture formulation and ingredient data which can then be compared, checked and archived, as well as enhanced data-table features with new calculations and summary views, all of which will be welcomed by formulation chemists. 

Revvity Signals software solutions accelerate chemical innovation by streamlining operations and communication, enabling chemists to develop new, greener products or modify existing ones, giving them the flexibility to investigate the most versatile, sustainable options for them. Specifically, AI tackles challenges when synthesizing large and small molecules by providing suggestions to refine their design, and recommending optimal reaction conditions, reducing the burden on cheminformaticians. The flagship Signals One offers native integration with ChemDraw and Spotfire® and provides direct access to generative AI and advanced natural language processing to streamline research workflows. By harnessing AI-enhanced research capabilities, users can make faster, more-informed decisions to help accelerate discoveries.

For example, AI-powered semantic search helps to handle both simple and complex queries, enabling searches in any language for enhanced accessibility and precision. Similarly, the summarization assistant enables users to generate rapid, efficient summaries while staying securely within the Revvity Signals solution, saving time and boosting productivity.

As part of a coherent digital strategy, AI tools empower scientists throughout their workflows, offering intelligent suggestions and visualizations, helping teams move from insight to action more efficiently. Revvity Signals solutions ensure your data is unified and modeled to be fully AI-ready, allowing it to be easily interrogated, analyzed, and evaluated by AI tools.

With intelligent, integrated data management and AI-based analytics and visualization embedded within the platform, researchers can use these capabilities to explore the relationships between component changes in the process, and make smarter, faster decisions.

What’s more, Revvity Signal software is continuously improving, utilizing AI even within their customer support framework to quickly resolve issues and enhance customer satisfaction.

As global political concern for sustainability propels industries towards a greener future, harnessing the power of digital solutions will enable the Indian chemical sector to continue to grow while simultaneously reducing environmental impacts.

(The article is contributed by Revvity Signals.)

_{Images are for reference only.Images and contents gathered automatic from google or 3rd party sources.All rights on the images and contents are with their legal original owners.}