Dr LORENA SOUZA

We are pleased to announce that Dr Lorena Souza has been awarded the 'Connected Plant Game Changer Award' for her work in delivering breakthrough digitalization projects for Siemens PSE.

Watch the video

Hear Lorena describe what the award means to her.

About Lorena's work

Lorena has been a key player in bringing SPSE's Digital Applications technology to market.

Having joined SPSE in 2019, she quickly rose to a position of responsibility in the Digital Applications group.

Within two years of starting her industrial career, she was a key member of a 5-person team deploying an energy system optimizer on a large European refinery, achieving significant cost and environmental benefits for SPSE’s client.

Lorena was heavily involved in several elements of this project that were 'first-of-a-kind', one key innovation being how to turn the optimal operating set-points calculated by the optimizer into practical advice that operators could understand and would deploy.

She then led the digital application activities to deploy a connected-plant digital application on 12 cracking furnaces in a Middle East ethylene plant, soft-sensing difficult-to-measure cracking furnace yields and effluent compositions. The application estimates the extent of coke formation in cracking furnace tubes, then calculates the olefins yield via detailed cracking kinetic models.

Each application estimates the extent of coke formation in cracking tubes, then calculates the olefins yield via detailed cracking reaction kinetic models.

Lorena led all the deployment activities, from factory to site acceptance testing and handover. She worked with control engineers and operators to understand their requirements and led the design and build of the digital application system.

A key innovation was a data transfer monitoring system that pushed system health updates to the DCS.

Digitalizing plant operations – creating the future now

A key component of SPSE's business is Digital Applications for Operations, where high-fidelity gPROMS models are implemented within the plant automation system. Combined with real-time and historic plant data, the model-based applications are used for monitoring, soft-sensing, real-time optimization (RTO) and “what-if” studies. The result is better operations, with more efficient plants operating more sustainably, at lower cost and with reduced CO2 emissions. The technology that Lorena has been working with has indeed 'changed the game', by making it easy for process operations to achieve significant gains from digitalization with immediate effect. See more on Digital Applications.