General Electric (GE) plans to set up an Industrial Internet Centre of Excellence at the Indian Institute of Technology Madras (IIT Madras) to develop the first of its kind digital solution that will serve the global aluminium smelter industry.

IIT Madras is one of the foremost institutes in higher technological education.

The two entities will develop power intensive applications with the first focus on rolling out a Digital Twin of an Aluminium Smelter, said a statement from GE.

Aluminium smelters are essentially refineries for extracting aluminium from aluminium oxide, separating the aluminium from oxygen through a chemical reaction. Through the new centre, GE and IIT Madras will create a Digital Twin of a smelter. The Twin is a living digital model that will continuously generate new data and insights about the smelter that allows operators to run the smelters more efficiently. For the aluminium smelter industry, the net gains through such productivity enhancement are valued at between $50 to 150 million annually, it added.

The centre marks a milestone global collaboration by GE to drive digital industrial transformation that can bring quantum leaps in productivity, efficiency and reliability to the industrial sector. Integrating heavy machinery with advanced software and analytics to create Digital Twins, the digital industrial solutions are powered by Predix, the world’s first and only cloud-based operating system built exclusively for industry, it said.

A mere 1 per cent increase in productivity through the application of Industrial Internet solutions can contribute to a 20 per cent potential increase in performance for its customers, said the statement.

GE’s dedicated teams in the Middle East will also play an active role in the collaboration, leveraging their expertise of working with some of the world’s largest aluminium smelters in the UAE and Bahrain, it added.

The Digital Twin of the Aluminium Smelter will enable the industry not only to optimise costs through advanced and precision preventive maintenance but also by streamlining power use efficiency. This in turn will help save on the cost of power needed for primary aluminium production, it stated.

Azeez Mohammed, president and CEO, GE Power Services, Middle East and Africa (MEA), said: “The agreement with IIT Madras underlines our commitment to building industry-academia linkages to support digital industrial transformation.”

“Digitisation is the future of industry, and our Industrial Internet solutions aim to enhance efficiency, reliability and productivity through proactive monitoring and diagnosis of the operational processes,” he said.

“The pioneering work in creating the Digital Twin of an Aluminium Smelter at the Centre, and the solutions co-created with the expertise of the IIT Madras faculty and researchers will support the industry to achieve cost savings and improved productivity. These digital solutions can be replicated at smelters across the world,” he added.

Professor Bhaskar Ramamurthi, director of IIT Madras, said: “This is a remarkable opportunity to work with GE’s global team of experts to develop path-breaking solutions for the smelter industry.”

“GE is an ideal partner to this collaboration and its strong digital industrial capabilities will help achieve the desired results in enhancing the operational efficiency of the smelter industry,” he said.

“Our faculty and researchers have in-depth understanding of physics-based process modelling, and we will work with multi-sectoral experts at GE’s different offices around the world to innovate new solutions. We are delighted that the solutions co-created by IIT Madras and GE will have global application, thus adding to the reputation of our organisation,” he added. – TradeArabia News service