WACKER Presents Its Sustainability Award to Honor Innovative Approach to Process Control in Production

Burghausen, Oct 27, 2023

Chemical Group WACKER presents its Net Zero Award to honor an engineering project for its innovative approach to more efficient process control in production. The Net Zero Award, worth 10,000 euros, is presented each year to individuals or teams whose projects contribute to the implementation of the Group’s sustainability goals. This year’s award winner is Markus Bauer, whose project team developed a model-based process control system called Advanced Process Control (APC) to optimize production processes in real time. The award ceremony took place this week at the Group’s Sustainability Conference in Burghausen.

Susatinatalk Net Zero Award — At the WACKER Net Zero Award ceremony: CEO Dr. Christian Hartel, award winner Dr. Markus Bauer and Dr. Peter Gigler, Head of Sustainability (from left). (Photo: WACKER)

“WACKER has set itself challenging sustainability goals, which include reducing our absolute greenhouse gas emissions by 50 percent by 2030 and achieving net zero by 2045,” explained Christian Hartel, CEO of Wacker Chemie AG. He added that in order to meet these goals, a committed organization was needed that pulled together and worked on numerous projects to create a great many levers, both large and small. “Our WACKER Net Zero Award serves to honor this commitment and outstanding projects that reduce greenhouse gas emissions and further minimize resource consumption in our own products and processes.”

Advanced Process Control – the award-winning project – is a software-based methodology from the Industry 4.0 environment used to optimize process control in chemical facilities. In this way, data from an actual facility, as well as external parameters, such as air temperature and humidity, are entered into a dynamic, model-predictive control technique with APC. This forward-looking process optimization makes it possible, for example, to save some of the heating steam required for distillation columns or powder dryers.

Throughout the WACKER Group, more than 100 APC controllers with more than 600 control loops are currently active within all business divisions and at all major sites, especially in large upstream facilities worldwide, as they are ideal for this methodology due to their high throughput. Based on internal calculations, these APC controllers help WACKER save 150 kilotons of carbon dioxide a year.

“This method perfectly demonstrates the opportunities that lie in the intelligent combination of IT and engineering,” the CEO went on to say. “By broadly leveraging the opportunities offered by digitalization, the award winner and his team are significantly helping to improve the energy efficiency of our integrated production system and further minimize the environmental footprint of our operations. In this way, the award winner is making a valuable contribution that will move our Group forward on the path to achieving net zero and at the same time make our manufacturing setup even more productive. Sustainability and competitiveness go hand in hand in this approach. That makes it a natural candidate for the WACKER Net Zero Award.”