June 26, 2019 - Air Products and Chemicals Inc. has won a 2019 Customer Excellence Award from Siemens for its use of the Siemens MindSphere IoT platform to support a web-based predictive monitoring and fault diagnostics tool.
The winners of the 14th annual Customer Excellence Awards (CEA) were announced at the 2019 Automation Summit in Aurora, Colo. in June. These awards recognize Siemens customers and partners who “exemplify advanced manufacturing and digitalization using Siemens technologies and solutions in their plants and manufacturing environments,” according to Raj Batra, president of Digital Industries, U.S.
Both a chemical industry producer and machine builder, Air Products and Chemicals Inc. provides atmospheric and process gases to a variety of manufacturers, as well as sell related equipment that manufacturers to create their own gases onsite. Their ProcessMD application uses advanced statistical models on variables like ambient temperature and production rate to determine when key process variables are moving out of range. Then it provides early warnings about pending issues to engineers and operators, well before actual system alerts are triggered.
Air Products’ Modeling and Data Sciences Center developed ProcessMD to use internally, but now uses the MindSphere cloud-based, open IoT operating system from Siemens to add value to the application when licensing it to third-party customers. Other own/operators can now use ProcessMD to proactively monitor their plant conditions and gain insights.
“MindSphere provides seamless data brokering from our customers’ plants to our ProcessMD platform to help detect and diagnose emerging issues,” said Dr. Stephen Cook, Director of Air Products Computational Technology Group. In addition, MindSphere allows their data to be securely connected and shared in real-time, and on a continuous basis, he said.
