CURRENTA Improves Sustainability Management Using Operational Data

Company that manages CHEMPARK found immediate value with TrendMiner

CURRENTA Improves Sustainability Management Using Operational Data

Company that manages CHEMPARK found immediate value with TrendMiner

About CURRENTA

CURRENTA is a service company for the chemical industry. It provides access to energy, technology, and product networks—including disposal—to more than 70 partner companies while guaranteeing maximum reliability, efficiency, and safety from its services.

The company does this through the management of CHEMPARK, one of the largest chemical sites in Europe, with operational locations in Leverkusen, Krefeld-Uerdingen, and Dormagen. CURRENTA employs around 3,400 people

In addition to the infrastructure and physical resources, CURRENTA provides vocational training for Bayer, LANXESS, Covestro, and other partner companies. The service company trains around 800 people per year in more than 20 professions for the partner companies and for itself.

Their Digitalization Journey

In a highly regulated market environment, CURRENTA is challenged with transforming in a sustainable way. Safety is a top priority. The control systems of the different facilities play a crucial role in meeting this objective. Until recently, CURRENTA lacked a way for its engineers to perform deeper analysis and forecast trends of the behavior of those control systems.

Solutions & Implementation

To leverage operational data and learn more about its own processes, CURRENTA deployed TrendMiner in February 2022. Full integration of the software was completed in just over six weeks. About 30 users work with the software, especially in company’s water and wastewater segment.

Use Case: Monitor for Wastewater Leak

During its trial, engineers used TrendMiner to determine the root cause of a previously undiscovered creeping leak at the Leverkusen site. Although no environmental or safety limits were exceeded during the leak, wastewater still poured slowly from a stacking tank into the treatment plant.

In all, the fill level increased by 0.4 percent over 10 days. This value is low and falls within the range of measurement uncertainty for fill level measurement. The operations control system did not have a way to detect the leak before it caused greater concern. Using TrendMiner’s patented search and compare features, engineers were able to determine the source of the leak.

They set up a monitor and alert to let them know when a leak occurs. In each trigger to test the system, TrendMiner’s monitors and alerts caught the leak in time for engineers to make necessary corrections. Meanwhile, additional use cases were established. These include monitoring energy to optimize efficiency using TrendMiner.

Benefits

CURRENTA immediately saw benefits using TrendMiner. In addition to finding leaks, engineers have used the software to:

Find defects in pumps and machines quickly

See small changes in trends displayed on users’ dashboards so they can take action on deviations before problems can occur

Achieve greater plant efficiency

Reduce costs throughout production

Eliminate downtime, which in turn reduced energy-consuming processes and accelerated CURRENTA’s sustainability agenda

“With the help of TrendMiner, we can detect deviations early on and counteract them. That makes an important contribution to improving the sustainability of water treatment plants.”

Anne GrigoleitPlant Engineer at CURRENTA

“The combination of process information system and TrendMiner is perfect for us. We don’t just collect data. We can now analyze it over a long period of time, increase the efficiency of our plants, and execute very precise damage prevention.”

Sven WeiseHead of PLT Energy at CURRENTA

“For these use cases, our plant engineers can use TrendMiner for independent analyses that would otherwise need to be conducted in collaboration with a data scientist not familiar with the subject.”

Maximilian SchwarzData Scientist in Innovation Projects at CURRENTA