NEW DELHI: GE and Vedanta Limited – Aluminium & Power business, signed an agreement to implement GE’s Digital Smelter solutions at its largest smelter in India at Jharsuguda in Odisha to significantly increase its operational efficiency and productivity.
Vedanta Limited – Aluminium & Power business is India’s largest producer of aluminium with an installed capacity of 2.2 MTPA and has an extensive portfolio of value-added aluminium products which are used by a wide gamut of core industries.
This will be the first such deployment of digital twin technology at any aluminum smelter in India and is part of Vedanta’s long-term digital transformation initiatives.
The digital twin technology and advanced data analytics being deployed are expected to substantially reduce specific power consumption at the smelter.
Typically, a one-percent reduction in specific power consumption based on digital smelter solutions can save about USD 4-5 million annually in the smelter potlines alone, for every 1 million ton per annum (MTPA) of aluminum production.
In addition, this digital solution is expected to improve raw material utilization, increase smelter pot life, operational efficiency, safety and reduce wastage.
GE’s Digital Smelter solutions are a significant step in charting the next generation of smelting operations globally.
Information and real-time data will be processed using data analytics to generate alerts and insights which will be shared with plant operators and maintenance teams to help them execute their duties more effectively and achieve greater business outcomes for the plant.
GE’s digital solutions use machine learning algorithms to provide multiple outcomes such as pot health/leak alerts, virtual-sensor based dosing recommendations, anode-effect predictions, etc. which are entirely data analytics driven and require no additional sensing hardware or infrastructure.
GE’s suite of Digital Smelter solutions is being internally developed jointly by GE Digital and GE Global Research Center to address all the elements of such a large-scale operation in the potlines, as well as for the other operational adjacencies that make up the entire smelter plant ecosystem.
