Thermo-Cognitive Advanced Process Control (TC-APC) models, simulates and optimizes your process in real time to improve yield, conversion and throughput, and reduce energy use, with a quick payback.
Track record
Fourteen carbonation towers at Saurashtra Chemicals.
Deployed and validated
Saurashtra Chemicals, a division of Nirma Ltd, at Porbandar on the Saurashtra coast. The carbonation towers are where soda ash production is decided: a multiphase reactor and a multistage crystallizer in one vessel, running chemical absorption, reactive precipitation, heat and mass transfer at the same time and in the same place.
A hybrid thermodynamic, kinetic and physical model of that process, solving over three hundred simultaneous equations in real time against live plant data. It read all fourteen towers through the existing control system, took laboratory analyses as they arrived, and issued setpoints back to the same system. Nothing in the plant was replaced.
It ran on trial for six months. The towers placed on it held their parameters in a tighter band and showed an increase in conversion efficiency, which is the finding the General Manager put in writing at the end of the trial.
The letter, and the man who will take your call.
Those towers which were put on this software were having better control of parameters and showed increase in conversion efficiency.
D. N. Sharma Then General Manager Maintenance, Saurashtra Chemicals, a division of Nirma Limited, Porbandar.
He coordinated the project
From the plant side, through the installation, the trial and the assessment at the end of it. He is not a reference we were given. He is the man who ran it with us.
He will take a reference call
He has agreed to speak to anyone seriously considering this work. Ask us and we will put you in touch. No conditions, and we do not need to be on the call.
The work was carried out under an earlier company name, which is the one that appears on the letter. The scan is of the copy we hold. A cleaner original is being looked for and will replace it here when it is found.
Alongside our deployment
Our Chief Scientific Advisor's industrial record
855 MW
Paint to Power, with Chrysler and Ameren
Chrysler's St. Louis plants sent their paint solids to Ameren's 855 MW Meramec power plant, where they replaced about 570 tons of coal a year. Prof. Biswas led the project to capture mercury with the titanium dioxide in those solids. 2007 Chrysler Environmental Leadership Award.
98.9%
Fine particles captured at a steel smelter
A pulse-energized electrostatic precipitator, tested on an iron and steel smelter's exhaust, captured over 98.9% of particles from 0.16 to 6.7 µm by number.
17
US patents
Including capture of heavy-metal emissions from combustion exhaust, electrostatic capture of fine particles, and aerosol sensing.
Published
Written down, where it can be checked.
Chemical Weekly, 14 October 2025
Optimisation of chemical processes using hybrid technology, artificial intelligence and process knowledge. A special report covering the combination of process knowledge with AI across nitration, condensation, carbonation, sugar crystallization and Grignard reactions.
Cut-point determination in the vacuum fractionation of odour-critical products
Three pages on the measurement problem in batch fractionation and what can be inferred without new analyzers, including a section on what the approach cannot do. Download the note, PDF.
Who did the work.
An engineering group of IIT Bombay alumni. The engines behind TC-APC were built within the group, and the group customizes and tunes them to each process it takes on.
The group works on model-based supervisory control for thermally constrained and composition-limited processes. More about the group, and how to reach us.
The mark
Find the optimum. Hold it while it moves.
The curve is a yield or selectivity response. The amber point is the optimum, and the dashed drop is where it sits on the operating axis.
The second half of the line is the part that matters. Finding an optimum is a study, and studies end up in drawers. Holding one while the feed, the fouling, the weather and the wear keep moving it is a control problem, and that is the work.
Ask for the reference call
Speak to the General Manager who ran the trial
He has agreed to take calls from anyone seriously considering this work. Ask and we will put you in touch. We do not need to be on the call.
projects@yielddynamics.in Talk to IIT Bombay engineers Call +91 94230 07004Monday to Saturday, 9:00 to 19:00 IST
Or start with your own numbers
Send three months of operating data from one column
We will tell you what your transition cut is costing you, with the uncertainty stated openly rather than buried. No charge, and no commitment either way. Including the answer that there is nothing here worth pursuing.