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Applications
The foundation for GPC is a new
ability to see and explore an entire process of many hundreds of
process variables on one screen and to go on to find better
operating limits, Consistent Alarm Limits and Alerts, Best Operating Envelopes
without any need for
mathematical skills. The underlying objective is to reduce
operational variability but in a way that everyone in your plant can
understand and will support. It is very rare to find truly novel
technological solutions to existing problems so take time to look around and see some of our
industry
case
studies showing major
process improvement. Then if you are interested and you
want to know more please
contact us.
Take a look around and
discover how GPC
technology products can lead to process improvement for your business.
Contact us
for more information.
GPC has been used with
outstanding and often surprising results for:
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Problem solving and
process stewardship
- addressing the needs of front-line process operations
engineers for a quick and easy-to-use method to answer
the everyday questions in a plant such as 'why isn't the
process working as well as it did last week?' as well as
checking that improvements already made remain made.
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Alarm Management.
It seems obvious when you think about it that all the
problems of alarm systems begin and end with the values
at which the alarm limits are set. But there has never
been a method to calculate them. Now there is. GPC is
the only method with a scientific basis for calculating
Alarm Limits and Alerts. We do it for many variables at
once so it is much faster and the alarm limits are
better because they are consistent with each other.
Users have found it cuts the time for Alarm
Rationalisation projects by at least 20% as well as
giving better alarms and a safer process. It makes the
subsequent Management of Change easier too.
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Multi-Phase Batch
Process Control.
Batch processes were always difficult to
analyse and control because there were so many variables
changing at once and so many quite different sets of
activities taking place in sequence. Users were not able
to directly compare the many tens or hundreds of process
variables and quality results across batches in a
meaningful way let alone the reasons for the differences
in performance of two or more apparently identical
reactors. Process control has been limited to forcing
the trajectory of a single variable, such as reactor
temperature, to follow the same trajectory as that in a
‘golden’ batch. That was the past. Now they can compare
many batches and many reactors with ease and go on to
build realtime control models without maths.
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Operating Envelope Models for Continuous Process Control
- A MIMO controller that requires no maths and no
identification experiments and can work in open or
closed-loop control above an existing regulatory control
system. Includes RealTime Optimisation (RTO) too.
Out-performed a leading MBC Controller in its first
trial. An order of magnitude cheaper to implement and
maintain than MBC too.
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Improving
Six Sigma and
similar Continuous Improvement Methodologies -
A 'No Equations'
Six Sigma tutorial for Lean Manufacturing in process
plants
(Six
Sigma)
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Process Data Mining
without maths for the Support Specialists. Explore
datasets containing hundreds of process and quality
variables and tens or even hundreds of thousands of rows
entirely visually using CVE's sophisticated but simple
to use Query capabilities to drill deeper than you have
ever drilled before. Discover black holes, different
operating Modes, unsuspected relationships yet be able
to communicate your findings easily to anyone on your
site.
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Quality by Design
(QbD)
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A new way to approach
Design Of Experiments
(DOE)
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THE only complete solution
for
Process Analytical
Technologies
(PAT)
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Quality Tracking
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Formulation and
scale-up
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Production
reporting
Case
Studies let you see how GPC is being successfully
implemented across different industries. You may well be
experiencing the same problems as many of our customers were
before they started using our software tools.
Curvaceous Software is the only
business-to-business technology company specialised in the
application of n-dimensional geometry
to the business
problems
of the process industries and in particular to
operating cost reduction by
decreasing operational variability in plants. Our technology is
called Geometric Process Control (GPC)
and is based on the parallel coordinate transformation.
Reducing operational
variability will give you financial benefits in many ways
such as: increased throughput, efficiency, quality, yield and
extraction; decreased energy, recycle, waste, re-work, additives,
chemicals, emissions and product inventory. The sum of all these
will give you a substantial operating cost reduction.
You can use Geometric Process Control with or
without an improvement management technology such as
Total Quality Management (TQM)
or Six Sigma, although our use of
geometry improves the Six Sigma method and its effectiveness too.
Interactive
visualisation provided by our products allows end-users to
investigate, understand and solve operational problems without
requiring an extensive mathematical background. This is in contrast
to methods based on statistics, chemometrics, principal components
analysis (PCA), partial least squares (PLS) or neural networks.
The user of Geometric Process Control interacts
directly with the full extent of his data instead of reducing it to
a few artificial variables. Pre-formed hypotheses are not required,
but can be used to advantage while existing opinions and beliefs
about process operation are easily tested.
Geometric Process Control enables end-users to
work much faster while gaining a better and more detailed
understanding of how a process really operates. The speed of
process improvement and process
optimisation are greatly increased
by the better understanding of the process conferred by the
intuitive visual interface. Communication of the new understanding
across an organisation is made much easier by visualisation.
Our Geometric Process Control products are in
use in over 120 large process plants worldwide including Food,
Pharmaceuticals (including primary or API manufacturing, secondary
manufacturing, product formulation and product development),
speciality and fine chemicals, commodity chemicals, cement, glass,
paper, semi-conductors, pigments, minerals processing, polymers,
petrochemicals, oil refining, offshore oil production, oil and gas
exploration and drilling, defence, aerospace manufacturing.
We provide our technology conveniently packaged
in a small number of versatile and ready-to-use software products
aimed at end-users performing functions such as Process Engineer,
Production Engineer, Pharmacist, Process Chemist, Technician,
Process Operator, Control Engineer, Improvement Engineer,
Formulation Scientist.
Operational
Variability Reduction applications of Geometric Process
Control for batch processes and continuous processes include
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Everyday process
problem solving or ‘fire-fighting’ to quickly answer
questions such as “why isn’t my plant working as well as it was
last week?”
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Process
Stewardship – daily monitoring by process engineers to
ensure the plant works at its best all of the time and not just
some of the time is made much faster and easier when the
engineer can see and interact with several hundreds of variables
at once in the parallel coordinates
display. Continuous vigilance is needed to maintain an operating
cost reduction.
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Production
Reporting –
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One parallel coordinate graph replaces
many y-t graphs and shows overall achievement against
multiple objectives over a period of time
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GPC parallel coordinate charts are a
multi-variable replacement for the SPC Charts
used in statistical process control.
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Finding better Operating Limits and Control Limits on many process and
result variables simultaneously to increase achievement of a
business objective. Takes much less time than existing methods.
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Identifying
Operating Modes of a continuous process is much easier
when you can see them. There may be some you aren’t aware of
because you couldn’t see them before. Now it is easy to give
each Mode its own Operating Limits and Alarm Limits and even its
own Operating Envelope.
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Batch Process
Analysis to understand and reduce in-batch operational
variability and run-to-run operational variability. You can
compare many batches in one picture or compare the performance
of several ‘identical’ batch reactors.
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Consistent Alarm
Limits allow better Alarm
Management and a safer process. Geometric Process Control
is the first-ever method to give numeric values for alarm limits
for many variables simultaneously so that they are consistent
alarm limits. They give earlier warning, giving the operator
more time to react, with an immediate reduction in false alarms,
standing alarms and alarm annunciation
rate.
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Shorter Alarm
Rationalisation projects are the result of consistent
alarm limit values being quickly and accurately calculated from
an easily understood scientific basis which eliminates all the
opinion and consequent time-consuming debate caused by present
one-at-a-time methods. And you won’t need to repeat the alarm
rationalisation project every five years as so often happens
today.
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Increased Throughput without sacrificing
yield or quality can be achieved using GPC’s n-dimensional
geometry Operating Envelope which brings further operational variability reduction by
including and compensating for all variable interactions. The
operating envelope is shown to the operator pictorially in terms
of the existing process and result variables only with open or
closed-loop guidance in how to keep the process inside the
envelope and thus achieving the primary operating objective,
which is usually the production of saleable product
.
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Intrinsically
Safe Control. Operating advice provided by Geometric
Process Control is intrinsically safe because of the underlying
geometric basis of the envelope and advice algorithms. Only
advice to move inwards into the known safe space of the
Operating Envelope can be generated.
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Inferential
prediction of variables not measured in real-time
improves process operation by eliminating sampling activity,
waiting time and cost of laboratory analysis results. It is
implicit in GPC’s Operating Envelope and requires no maths to
implement for one or several variables. Prediction capability
can be tested offline in GPC’s parallel coordinate chart.
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Open-Loop control
/ Operator Guidance Control predominates for batch
processes in the pharmaceutical and speciality chemical
industries, possibly because there was previously no capable and
affordable multi-variable closed loop controller available for
batch processes. Open Loop control is provided by the GPC
Operating Envelope with Closed Loop available by entering output
destinations for control signals.
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Closed-Loop
control removes the operator from the loop increasing its
reliability and ensuring that all control actions are
implemented in a timely fashion. The GPC Operating Envelope
includes cascade coupling and anti-windup capability.
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Process
Identification is not needed by GPC saving considerable
project time and expense. A comparative trial in closed-loop
control above a conventional PID control system gave better
results than a commercial Model Based
Control (MBC) system.
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Minimum energy
usage, minimum emissions, minimum cost, maximum
throughput are typical Secondary Operating Objectives and are
achieved in Geometric Process Control
by finding sub-spaces within the Operating Envelope where
both the primary and secondary objectives are achieved. This is
Real-Time Optimisation. Objectives are specified by the Operator setting appropriate
target ranges on process variables. No steady-state detector is
required.
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Generation and real-time display of
Operator Alerts consistent with
the previously-found High and Low Alarm Limits. The Alerts have
the objective of preventing High and Low Alarms so further
increase process safety by
reducing the Probability of Failure on
Demand (PFD) following a High/Low alarm annunciation.
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Cycle time and product quality variability
in complex batch processes can be reduced by using the Operating
Envelope for Multi-Phase Batch Process
Control. Sub-envelopes for each Phase are found without
further end-user effort. Control can be open-loop operator
guidance or closed loop.
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Fault Detection
/ Early Event Detection.
Use of an Envelope as a means of detection has been found to
give earlier detection of changed process behaviour than methods
based on multi-variate statistics.
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Time and experiments for Formulators and
Scientists can be reduced through Response Surface Visualisation. The response surface is
formed from the experimental values and results of even a small
series of Designed Experiments (DOE) with no mathematical
knowledge required. The experimenter or Product Formulator is given the capability using
interactive visualisation to find for himself, without
mathematics, the next experiment to perform. This saves him time
and can result in fewer experiments.
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Interactive
Visualisation of the Design
Space and Control Space
defined by the FDA Quality by Design
(QbD) initiatives leads directly to the Operating
Envelope that is the unstated heart of the FDA
Process Analytical Technology (PAT)
initiative. Communication in visual form of the justification
for the choice of a particular Design, Control or Operating
space demonstrates the underlying process knowledge, and
limitations of knowledge, that are at the heart of the FDA and
ICH objectives in the registration of pharmaceutical products
for human use.
lean manufacturing. lean
manufacturing. statistical process control. statistical
process control. statistical process control.
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