Curvaceous Win AMEC Award From IChemE

We are this year’s proud winners of the AMEC Award for Innovation and Excellence in an SME. The Institution of Chemical Engineers presented us with the award at their annual awards ceremony. See photo here

The Award is given annually to the small business that is deemed to have produced an outstanding technical invention. Geometric Process Control (GPC) impressed the judges by the originality of its approach to long unsolved problems, its invention and implementation of wholly new technology and its successful business application. Over 85 major blue-chip companies are already using GPC to reduce variable operating costs, to increase efficiency and throughput and reduce variability in their product quality. Users are gaining additional benefit from GPC’s impact in improving process safety, reducing environmental damage and saving engineering time.

The IChemE Awards are keenly contested with over 60 entrants in this their twelfth year. Curvaceous Software and GPC have had an impressive year with recognition by the Carbon Trust and the Institute of Electrical Engineers in both of their Innovation Award programmes. Curvaceous was placed in the top four by the Institution of Electrical Engineers from a global field of entrants, and in April’s Carbon Trust Awards for reducing emissions of CO2 GPC ranked in the top three from over 250 entrants. This new trophy shares pride of place with the European Process Safety Centre Award 2003 for the biggest single contribution to improving the safety of process plants. This was for our fundamental work in relating alarms to process operation and for GPC being the first-ever method to calculate values for alarm limits.

What's New?
 

NEW CUSTOMERS

We are pleased to welcome several new customers including Lanxess (Germany), Ineos Vinyls (UK), Boehringer Ingleheim (Germany), Ticona (Germany), MIRO (Germany), Thomas Swan (UK) and the National Institute of Health (USA). Benefits are already being seen;

"In the first week of the application of Curvaceous Visual Explorer
(CVE) we recognised a previously unknown problem in one of our production procedures. This recognition, through using CVE, was due to the detailed analysis of many years of process data that with previous analysis using traditional methods had not been discovered." Dr. Martin Bohnenpoll - Lanxess Deutschland GmbH

Particularly significant to us is the evidence that our Agent programs in Germany and USA are working. These show that it is possible to transfer our knowledge and skills in Geometric Process Control to entrepreneurial and motivated individuals with good knowledge of the process industries. In time we expect these Agents to recruit their own engineers locally so that customers will have support in their own country and in their own language. We want to appoint and train more Agents, particularly in Northern Europe so please bring this to the attention of any suitable individuals and suggest that they contact us.   
 

CVE 2.4

We are hard at work on CVE 2.4 with new features culled from the user requests received at the Annual TAP Forum and from the User Group website. CVE Usage in practice seems to be divided between a small number of power-users and a much larger number of casual users so we have provided new features to help both groups. Remember, the only way to get product upgrades is to get them FREE as one of the benefits of having a TAP Subscription. Make sure yours is up to date and you will automatically receive a DVD in the post. Your TAP Subscription also gets you an Invitation to the Annual TAP Forum which will be held in the Spring.

If you don’t have a TAP Subscription you can still use our Help Desk but will need to have your credit card ready to pay the charges equivalent to £100/hour. Sometimes computers crash so catastrophically that they destroy the licence keys and you have to come to us and ask for new ones. We provide the service of creating new keys free to those with TAP Subscriptions and now provide it also for those without TAP Subscriptions as a Help Desk service. Re-issue of licences is of course open to fraud so you will be asked for written confirmation by your company of total licence loss. If you have been out of TAP for some time you should be aware that we only retain Key Generators for the current and immediately previous product Versions. We may not have the Key Generator for older Versions. 

PATENTS

We are pleased to announce the award of two more patents for GPC, one UK and one US. Trademarks for Curvaceous in the European Union and the USA have also been granted.

 
Reducing Product and Process Variability

One of the most common objectives that our customers have is the reduction of variability in the operation of their processes. Variability shows in too wide a spread of product qualities, efficiencies, yields and energy consumption. You can easily see it with CVE by creating a multi-variable contour chart showing your achievement against product specifications or efficiency. This will quickly show you where to improve your process operation and will give you a better set of control limits within which to operate. The Box algorithm tells you how much better you will perform with the new control limits and which variables should be the focus for further variability reduction activity.

It doesn’t take long to do using the data in your LIMS and Process Historian databases, doesn’t change the way in which you operate and doesn’t require any Capital Expenditure. The hardest step is, as always, the first step of deciding that you really do want to improve your process and committing yourself to make it happen.

You can use the same method for setting much better operator alarm limits too. This can be done for many variables at once so will save yourself a lot of time as well as having much better alarms than you have today. The alarms will be better in that there will be fewer false alarms so you can bring the limits further in to give the operator more reaction time. This is all possible because the limits are found using a scientific method for the first time and are Consistent with each other. As previously mentioned our method won the European Process Safety Centre Award in 2003 for the Biggest Single Contribution to Improving Process Safety. If you need to revamp your alarms then think CVE, get better alarms and a safer plant and save yourself weeks of effort as well.

The really nice thing is that having used CVE to improve your operations and make them safer, you will have already done a large part of the work necessary to take the next step of using the Operating Envelope of your process.  

“Operating Envelope” is one of those phrases that all engineers have used at some time but which has never had a quantitative description. This is because it is a complex multi-variable or multi-dimensional object and our brains are wholly incapable of visualising more than 3-dimensions. Curvaceous Process Modeller (CPM) neatly side-steps that problem by showing the process operator in real-time how to operate to stay inside the Operating Envelope.

Why is using the Operating Envelope even better than the much-better control limits we just found with CVE?  It is better because the Operating Envelope allows for the fact that variables interact with each other whereas fixed control limits ignore variable interactions. To get good results with control limits we have to make them as narrow as possible to try and get into the Operating Envelope as much as possible. This means we only use a part of the space that is available in the whole Operating Envelope so the process control problem is made harder and it is also extremely unlikely that the process is operating at its optimum. Today's process control methods take the fixed control limits approach even further by trying to control the process to operate at a target point inside the control limits. By operating in the Operating Envelope we obtain higher efficiencies and further reduce variability. The CPM Operating Envelope works for Batch and unsteady state processes as well as for Continuous processes. Much less time is required to create these models compared to traditional modelling methods and no mathematical skills are needed. Thus bringing to the whole of the process industries for the first time a complete non-linear process modelling and operations system requiring only good process knowledge to implement. Data in your existing LIMS and Process Historians is used thus avoiding the need for expensive process identification experiments. Maintenance is even less onerous than model development amounting to perhaps one day per 3 or 6 months.   Ask us about Condition Monitoring applications too… 

So will you reduce your process variability so that you reduce your products variability? Will you move and improve specifications thus justifying better prices than your competitors? Or will you wait for your competitors to do it first and then catch up?

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