GE Digital Smelter: Software to boost digital transformation of the Middle-East aluminium industry

The provider of software and IIoT services to industrial companies, GE Digital has announced the accessibility of its latest Process Analytics solution, the Digital Smelter.

GE Digital said: “The software creates a Digital Twin of the aluminium smelting process to deliver insights and prescriptive guidance to safely maximise production, reduce raw material costs, and optimise energy consumption.”

The technology boosts the digital transformation strategy of aluminium smelters in the Middle East region, which holds 8% of aluminium production globally. The new Digital Smelter can encourage the region’s aluminium industry to secure higher levels of productivity as well as preventive insights to enhance the uptime of the plants. The solution also strengthens GE Digital’s position in the metals and mining sector.

The Digital Smelter provides a downright analysis of the components within a pot as well as each pot line, delivering a Digital Twin to succour increase the efficiency of the smelting process. Furthermore, the software helps operators forecast potential process and equipment inconsistency and stipulate the most effective decisions. These competencies help to keep operations riskless and production optimal while declining operator error.

Nikos Zervos, Potlines Manager, Aluminium of Greece, said: “Digital Smelter has been implemented in Aluminium of Greece’s Mytilineos aluminium plant supporting the company’s goal to reduce electrical consumption by improving the accuracy of energy consumption models and pots’ overall performance.”

“The predictive analytics capabilities of the GE Digital Smelter solution help Aluminium of Greece’s frontline operations by providing timely operational recommendations, improving action efficiency and, as a result, working conditions,” he added.

The finest advantage of Digital Smelter is the in-depth prediction of pot leaks, which steers to the reduction of unexpected hurdles and optimizes pot health. Dispensing distress signal for abnormalities such as pot instability and undesirable events such as anode spikes help optimize energy consumption and keep the process reliable.

Digital Smelter can also refine the quality of aluminium and restricting raw material consumption by modelling the proper amount of aluminium fluoride to use in each batch.

Victor Voulgaropoulos, Verdantix Industry Analyst, said: “By combining physics-based modelling and ML-powered analytics, GE Digital's Digital Smelter solution helps smelters decrease raw material and energy consumption of the smelting process while opening new avenues for production optimization.”

The industry executives and management can easily access dashboards displaying the productivity, efficiency, and health of each potline or all lines across the organization. With the ability to benchmark performance across potlines, poor performing lines can be quickly identified and operators can review heat maps, performance trends, and pot health indicators to make decisions to restore the line’s performance and create more value for the business. The Digital Twin can then prescribe the best action to help ensure the plant doesn’t shut down over costly equipment failures or EHS events, which could lead to fines and additional regulatory requirements.

Linda Rae, General Manager of GE Digital’s Power Generation and Oil & Gas business, said; “Digital Twins are learning, living models that combine domain knowledge and physics with industrial AI.”

“Companies use this technology to detect, prevent, and predict critical issues to uncover insights and actions that drive business value. Our Digital Smelter software employs Digital Twins and other Industrial AI technologies to harness the power of data and drive business workflow automation, so companies around the world maximize the value of their software investment.”