PSE: Advanced Process Modelling Forum Gathers Process Industries in London

At the 5^th Advanced Process Modelling (APM) Forum in London this week, companies from across the process industries presented on topics ranging from accelerating development of the next generation of drugs to identifying hundreds of millions of Euros in operational savings in natural gas production.

Organised and hosted by Process Systems Enterprise (PSE), providers of the gPROMS APM platform, the two-day conference is a key event for process industry organisations focused on creating sustainable value through the application of high-accuracy predictive process modelling and optimisation.

In the sessions on formulated products, aimed at the pharmaceuticals, food & beverage, consumer goods and specialty chemicals sectors, presentations from AstraZeneca, Danone, Eli Lilly, Roche, Saint-Gobain, and Solvay described how new ‘digital design’ techniques are improving drug product manufacture, including development of robust continuous manufacturing processes, and accelerating time-to-market for new formulations.

A key event was the preview of PSE’s forthcoming gPROMS FormulatedProducts^TM environment for integrated design and optimisation of formulated products and their manufacturing processes. Developed in co-operation with specialists from several sectors, this allows scientists and engineers to screen formulations for end-user attributes, determine whether they can be manufactured efficiently, and then use the gPROMS platform's optimisation capabilities to optimise the whole formulation and manufacturing chain.

In the oil & gas, chemicals, petrochemical & refining sessions, where presenters included Bharat Petroleum, BP Exploration, DSM, Primetals, SABIC, SCG Chemicals, Shell, Sulzer, Velocys and Yara International, the focus was on large-scale optimisation applications capable of improving profit by tens or hundreds of millions of Euros. These included major new developments in oilfield optimisation capable of identifying millions of dollars a day in increased production, Shell's work on region-wide optimisation of natural gas processing facilities, Bharat Petroleum’s innovative work in real-time optimisation of refinery crude transition, and DSM’s operational optimisation of the utility systems supplying electricity and steam to large-scale industrial sites. SABIC described how model-based analysis helped reduce the time to screen anti-coking technologies for ethylene production from years to months.

PSE MD Costas Pantelides said, “A key focus of the conference has been the coming of age of equation-oriented (EO) process modelling tools. EO is a disruptive technology that for the first time makes it possible to optimise large-scale, complex process systems using high-fidelity models and apply techniques such as global system analysis to explore the design and operational space much more rapidly than previously possible. This is enabling companies to realise large gains in competitive advantage and dramatically accelerate innovation”.

Keynote speaker Peter Drogt of DSM, standing in for Dorus van der Linden, said that advanced process modelling is crucial technology for the organisation to accelerate innovation and quantify process decisions. A key reason for the company’s move to APM is the ability to have a single unified modelling platform across the process lifecycle.

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Contact information

Process Systems Enterprise
Kate Burness
+44-20-8563-0888
k.burness@psenterprise.com