Research projects

A research project begins where the project work meets a limit. A model can be built, but the effort bears no relation to the benefit. A method works on one plant and no longer on the next. Such questions need more time than a customer project allows, and more participants than one house.

We take part as a consortium partner. That means we bring in the view from running plant projects, provide simulation models of our own and take over a defined share of the work. The results are public; what proves useful as a tool we then build into SimReQs or into our own way of working.

For customers this has two effects. Methods we try out in a project are available earlier than through the market. And we know the state of research on the questions we work on at first hand.

Modelling a plant is the largest single item of virtual commissioning. Every shortening of that step affects every project that follows. That is what we work on: deriving models from existing data, reusable building blocks, and checks that run without handwork.

The second strand concerns the data a plant delivers in operation. They describe how the plant actually runs and can be held against the model. From the comparison arises a model that ages with the plant and keeps its state current.

Both strands pay into the same thing: the digital twin that outlasts a project. What arises as a method in a joint project stands afterwards in our tools and thereby in the projects of our customers.