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ACHEMA-Innovation Challenge - Winners nominated at ACHEMA-Pulse

Who is developing new approaches for the digitalization of the process industry? At the ACHEMA Innovation Challenge, the teams "Otto Normal" (Maximilian Kleine, Henrik Rosenberg), "Data Barber" (Iwan Kornijez, Tim Sandermann, Samuel Kieling), "MT DeepWater" (Karolina Weber, Marcus Linden, Oliver Balster, Philipp Wittenhorst, Hermann Wilde, Aike Sass) and "Banius - Intelligent Process Optimization" (Eske Hilbrands, Alexander Kerkenhoff, Robin Schröder, Hakan Bayer) have convinced with their five-minute pitches and were chosen as winners by the participants of the ACHEMA-Pulse through a live vote.

The ACHEMA Innovation Challenge called on innovative teams to develop solutions for the use of digital methods and artificial intelligence (AI) in the process industry. During a five-minute pitch, the teams had a chance to present their concepts before the audience finally voted in a live poll to determine the winner of each challenge.

https://www.achema.de/en/the-achema/innovation-challenge

To implement AI solutions in the process industry as part of the KEEN platform, ABB AG challenged participants to develop an intelligent pipeline that pre-processes, cleans and collect data sets - and does so automatically.

The team "Otto Normal" (Maximilian Kleine, Henrik Rosenberg) convinced with their innovative concept approach to use data predictions with the help of a recurrent neural network for cleaning, and ranked first, beating the team "D.A.T.A. Solutions" (Jesse Rejek, Philipus Putra, Yustinus Adrian, Ridzki Nugroho, Lingga Aksara Putra). Dr. Zied M. Ouertani, Vice President, Head of Technology Chemicals and Refining at ABB, congratulated the winning team and gave both teams the following advice to take along with them: “get in contact, work together, collaborate – no matter who wins”. The winning team "Otto Normal" will receive 1500 euros prize money, while the second-place winner will receive 750 euros.

The second challenge of the KEEN platform came from the TU Dortmund University, which formulated the question together with the TU Kaiserslautern and the sponsor d-fine GmbH: artificial intelligence is to be used in image recognition to determine the operating conditions in an extraction column with liquid-liquid flow.

In this competition, "Data Barber" (Iwan Kornijez, Tim Sandermann, Samuel Kieling) won against the "KEEN Seekers" (Rafael De Cerqueira, Omar Bayomie). Iwan Kornijez from Team Data Barber answered the question if this was a milestone: "Since we are all at the beginning of our career and we are still students, we will continue to study. It is a great experience to win a competition like this and to give a pitch at ACHEMA. It was an honor!" This commitment is rewarded with 1500 euros. Denis Ludwig, Head of Chemical Industry Services at d-fine GmbH, congratulated the first and second place winners

Predictive maintenance in water management was the topic of the MAIN hack, organized jointly with HTAI. EnviroChemie's challenge was the monitoring of plant components. The focus was on an AI optimization of a flotation unit for solid-liquid separation.

“MT DeepWater" (Karolina Weber, Marcus Linden, Oliver Balster, Philipp Wittenhorst, Hermann Wilde, Aike Sass) was in the audience's favor, putting "Okeanos" (Juliane Neumann, Henning Oppel, Benjamin Mewes, Önder Türksoy, Jonas Beckmann) in second place. Claudia Müller, Project Manager Business Development EnviroChemie, invited the winning team to the company headquarters in Roßdorf. "MT DeepWater" can look forward to a prize money of 1000 euros. The team will donate a part of the money and share the rest amongst all team members. The team in second place will receive 500 euros.

To monitor the dosing of chemicals for optimal sewage sludge treatment is the subject of the second challenge, which was set by Evonik. Many of these plants are not yet fully digitized; future solutions must be reliable and, above all, adapt to changing operating conditions.

The team "Banius - Intelligent Process Optimization" (Eske Hilbrands, Alexander Kerkenhoff, Robin Schröder, Hakan Bayer) came out on top here, pushing "PolyLyzer" (Michael Kocher, Thomas Theisen, Matthias Albers) into second place. Banius' commitment is rewarded with 1000 euro. Dr. Andree Blesgen, Head of Environmental Technology at Evonik, was very impressed by the pitches and the presented ideas, and he is looking forward to seeing one of the solutions implemented in the future.

The ACHEMA Innovation Challenge was announced for the first time in 2020. A total of 183 innovation-minded thinkers took part. Some registered as teams from the outset, while others came together during the course of the competition via the challenge's communication platform. In workshops they received advice on their solutions.

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