CdE Sustainable World

Sustainability is an imperative for companies seeking a more responsible and prosperous future. Organizations face a growing social and regulatory demand to pursue sustainable actions for the environment, taking into account the challenges facing the world such as climate change and the scarcity of natural resources. The demand to responsibly comply not only with sustainable practices, but also with existing regulations, is increasingly stronger from consumers, investors and governments.

Taking these factors into consideration and wanting to remain faithful to its already strong commitment to sustainability and carbon emissions reduction, one of the largest construction materials manufacturing companies in the United States (cement, aggregates, ready-mixed concrete, asphalt mix, etc.) set out to improve its emission control system to ensure compliance with current regulations, increase efficiency and open up new business opportunities.

The United States Environmental Protection Agency requires companies to constantly perform calculations and monitor certain emissions (metals and other elements) to ensure that emission levels are within permitted standards during the cement manufacturing process.

The company uses a large industrial oven during the cement manufacturing process. It is in operation 24/7 all year round, except for a few weeks in February for maintenance. Hundreds of sensors inside the oven monitor emissions, using a legacy solution that is more than 25 years old and based on more than three applications developed from various technologies.

This patchwork solution was originally created by a group of people who have by now left the company, resulting in a knowledge gap about the system components.

With neither the documentation of the proper procedures nor the people who originally knew how it worked, the challenge for the project involved developing a simpler, more modern solution that would allow the company to take the existing procedures and update them to create a totally new application. Considering the age of the previous application, this posed a particularly difficult challenge.

NEORIS' proposal consisted of offering the client recommendations regarding the functional behavior of the application, as well as the technological components that would help them meet the objectives. We carried out the architecture solution, testing and procedure tracking, releasing the new application for use during live production.

NEORIS took the calculations and information and interpreted the source code of the legacy application to remake it over entirely for the new application. Additionally, an autorecovery mechanism was created so that after a shutdown occurs in the oven, the application has the ability to recalculate any emissions when the machine is turned on again.

Finally, all measurements were tested by putting both the old and the new applications to use in parallel, comparing the emissions recorded by the legacy application with those recorded by the new application.