Innovation & thought leadership
Pushing the boundaries of what's possible
PSE as a company has always been strongly focused on innovation. Not only is our primary business to help our customers to innovate (and to manage the uncertainty and risk associated with innovation), but innovation is at the core of our own developments.
This was recognised by the Royal Academy of Engineering when we were awarded the MacRobert Award for Engineering Innovation, the UK's highest award for engineering*.
Thought leadership
PSE is an established thought leader in many of the areas in which the company operates.
In addition to pioneering the technology of Advanced Process Modelling and its application throughout the process industries, we are continually helping to bring fresh new approaches in diverse industry sectors.
Three of the areas where we are currently working with leading companies to push the boundaries are:
Oil & Gas safety
. Working with oil majors, we have developed new high-fidelity safety modelling techniques that are transforming the way depressurisation and similar pressure relief studies are carried out.Not only do PSE's high-fidelity models bring new capabilities for safety analysis and design, but also our systematic approach and rapid delivery capability – both of which have long been lacking in industry – make advanced analysis more easily accessible to operating and engineering companies.
Systems-based Pharmaceutics (SbP). PSE is working with leading pharma companies to implement a holistic model-based approach to the development and optimisation of drug manufacture and drug delivery.
SbP has the potential to transform pharmaceutical process development and design, leading to significantly accelerated development, improved R&D efficiency, reduced cost and risk and many other benefits.
Carbon capture & storage (CCS). PSE was selected by the Energy Technologies Institute to work with key European CCS stakeholder organisations E.ON, EDF, Rolls-Royce and Petrofac CO2DeepStore to develop a definitive systems-wide modelling capability for whole-chain CCS design and operability analysis.
Based on the gPROMS platform, the modelling environment provides high-fidelity models of all major chain components that can be combined to enable informed technical and economic decisions across areas up and down the CCS chain.
The objective is to accelerate the commercial deployment of CCS and help stakeholder organisations along the chain to manage the risk associated with new technology introduction.
The underlying technology – Advanced Process Modelling
Since its inception PSE has worked on developing and advancing the science and practice of Advanced Process Modelling.
Some areas of innovation in which we pushed and are pushing the capabilities of process modelling software are:
- Providing industry-leading capabilities in the areas of
- distributed systems modelling
- parameter estimation
- rate-based non-equilibrium modelling
- large-scale dynamic simulation
- optimisation – steady-state, dynamic and mixed-integer.
- Combining advanced process models with computational fluid dynamics (CFD) models, to combine detailed hydrodynamics and chemical phenomena in order to enable confident scale-up, detailed mechanical design and troubleshooting based on accurate predictiion.
- Industry-leading catalytic reaction models, and reactor models of all kinds
- Advanced thermodynamics. PSE's current gSAFT developments have the capability to revolutionise the way that physical property calculations are performed in the process industries.
*Previous and subsequent MacRobert Award winners include BP, IBM, Johnson Matthey, Microsoft, Rolls-Royce, British Gas, Arup, Inmarsat and Jaguar Land Rover.
