Overview
GE’s new digital smelting solution technology faces the challenge of decreasing costs while increasing efficiency.
GE’s digital smelting solutions will offer customers a unique opportunity to gain knowledge from operational data that will lead to increased efficiency, reliability and productivity.
Outcomes
increase in efficiency
total production cost savings
As the largest vertically integrated bauxite, alumina and aluminium production and trading unit in the European Union, we are constantly looking at innovative technologies to enhance our performance standards.
Dimitris Stefanidis
CEO of Aluminium of Greece
GE’s digital solutions offer customers a unique opportunity to gain insight from operational data to maximize efficiency, reliability and productivity. GE Power and Aluminium of Greece (AOG), a Mytilineos Group subsidiary, signed a multiyear agreement to implement first-of-their-kind digital smelter solutions to enhance AOG’s aluminium smelting process and contribute to increased operational efficiency and productivity.
The deal is significant in that GE Power and AOG have built a model for the next generation. The potential benefits from the deal include lower consumption of raw materials, decreased energy consumption, and fewer pot leakages.
“The application of digital industrial solutions is a remarkable opportunity to achieve process optimization across our operations and to push productivity levels,” said Dimitris Stefanidis, CEO of Aluminium of Greece. “With GE’s digital smelter solutions, we are setting a global first for the aluminium industry that will contribute to our operational efficiency and set new benchmarks in the sector.”
The digital solutions will operate in the cloud, powered by Predix*, GE’s operating system for the Industrial Internet. Virtual sensors will facilitate the ongoing evaluation of parameters such as temperature and chemistry that are not ordinarily monitored continuously. This, in turn, will help to anticipate the health and condition of the pot, providing timely operational recommendations for smelter optimization.
“GE has been at the forefront of digitizing the future of industry globally and in the region, providing digital industrial solutions for power generation and the LNG industry, among others,” said Joseph Anis, president & CEO of GE’s Power business in the Middle East and Africa. “By bringing together the strengths of our multi-locational teams and GE Power’s Digital Smelter Center of Excellence in Dubai, we will collaborate with AOG to create a new chapter in the history of smelting operations as well.”
GE is well-positioned to modernize the aluminium smelting process, marking a new era of productivity for the industry in Europe and beyond. Here are some of the cost-savings with an improvement in efficiency: a 1% increase in efficiency of aluminium smelter operations contributes to an annual global savings of USD$970M across the total cost of production, $936M in output increase, and $464M in operations and maintenance costs.
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