A Digital Twin for Process Operations based on Best Operation

Imagine your process performance if every operator had the insight of your most experienced expert operators. Now you can with Digital Twin models encapsulating the accumulated knowledge of your best process operation. With this continuous help process operation will improve, reducing operating costs, emissions and energy usage and delivering higher yields, more consistent product and a safer process. This technology is applicable to single and multi-mode continuous processes, batch and multi-grade processes including grade transitions.  It is easy for your engineers to implement.

If you don’t have a real-time first-principles model of your process you can either spend a lot of time and money to build one, or with PPCL’s geometry-based methods, you can use the knowledge of how your process’s “best operation” that is buried in your process history to directly advise your operators. 

Our models more faithfully represent your process (continuous, batch, grade transition and time-varying) for real-time use than any first-principles or physics-based model can.

“Best operation” means the model achieves Lagging KPI’s by capturing how you achieved them in the past using CVE. You extract this Envelope and reset the Operating Limits on the process variables and Leading KPI’s as many CVE-users are doing already for off-line optimization, alarm rationalization and condition monitoring. CPM then creates a real-time model of this new Operating Envelope complete with Operator Display and OPC Clients to connect to your DCS and/or process historian.

Open-loop Operator guidance starts from much more accurate Consistent Alarm Limits moving into dynamic model-based Operator Alerts. This change can be done in stages, providing a smooth and painless transition. The combination of Alerts and Alarms guides operators to keep the process operating at its best and provide Condition Monitoring with very long warning times of equipment changing its behavior as well as approaching avoidable process conditions such as column flooding or compressor surge.

Your existing process and control engineers build GPC models with training and coaching from PPCL. Experienced users say they can develop and commission a new model in a day because thanks to the inherently visual nature of geometry there are no equations to formulate and solve and no heavy maths – we build working models from scratch during webinars so you can see for yourself just how straightforward it is. The knowledge you will need is understanding of the process, its operating procedures and operating practices.