The impact of AR environment in enhancing visualization of petroleum refinery process

Abstract

Petroleum refinery is an industrial process plant where crude oil is being transformed and refined into most useful products. In the industrial process, it involves a lot of complicated physical and chemical processes that are sequentially applied for various refinery processes. Some employees are facing a difficulty to understand the training module because the tools being used limits the ability to learn and understand the abstract complex process and face the challenges to visualize the content as it is viewed via a two-dimensional (2D) method. Therefore, this paper tries to focus the attention on the practical use of AR in the crude oil refinery process, describing the potential and the effectiveness of this technology to enhance their visualization skill. The study used quasi-experimental research design on the technical employees that were trained on the basic refinery process of crude oil. Two groups of samples consist of an experimental group who were exposed to the AR environment and a control group that was taught using conventional training methods. The result demonstrated there is a significant difference between the scores obtained by the technical employees in the experimental group, thus the application of AR was able to enhance technical employees’ visualization skills as a training approach.