Innovation award for novel control technology

A Curvaceous Software product story

Edited by the Engineeringtalk editorial team Oct 10, 2005

Curvaceous Software is this year's proud winner of the AMEC Award for Innovation and Excellence in an SME.

Curvaceous Software is this year's proud winner of the AMEC Award for Innovation and Excellence in an SME.

The Institution of Chemical Engineers presented the award at its annual awards ceremony.

The award is given annually to the small business that is deemed to have produced an outstanding technical invention.

Curvaceous's Geometric Process Control (GPC) entry impressed the judges by the originality of its approach to long unsolved problems, its invention and implementation of wholly new technology and its successful business application.

Over 85 major blue-chip companies are already using GPC to reduce variable operating costs, to increase efficiency and throughput and reduce variability in their product quality.

Users are gaining additional benefit from GPC's impact in improving process safety, reducing environmental damage and saving engineering time.

The originality of Geometric Process Control stems from its provision of a graph for viewing and manipulating hundreds of variables at once.

Thus GPC replaces the need for the two or three variable graphs which have represented the state of the art in data visualisation and analysis for the last 5000 years.

The technical methodology behind GPC is firmly rooted in the mathematics of n-dimensional space.

This provides the ability to model the N-dimensional operating envelope of a process, another first, therefore allowing much better performance from existing processes without requiring capital investment.

It is expected that in time GPC will replace single-variable statistical process control (SPC).

But although the underlying maths may be complex, the user requires no mathematical skill at all.

All that is required are easily learnt skills for visually interpreting the new graphs and a familiarity with the process being studied.

The IChemE Awards are keenly contested with over 60 entrants in this their twelfth year.

Curvaceous Software and GPC have had an impressive year with recognition by the Carbon Trust and the Institution of Electrical Engineers in both their innovation award programmes.

Curvaceous was placed in the top four by the IEE from a global field of entrants, and in April's Carbon Trust Awards for reducing emissions of CO2 GPC ranked in the top three from over 250 entrants.

In 2003 Curvaceous won the European Process Safety Centre Award for the biggest single contribution to improving the safety of process plants for their fundamental work in relating alarms to process operation.

The EPSC is a part of the European Federation of Chemical Engineering.

Curvaceous Software is based in Gerrards Cross, Buckinghamshire with agents in Australia, Germany and North-East USA.

The company has been a past winner of DTI Smart Awards and has made good use of the UK Trade and Industry schemes to encourage exports.

Managing Director Dr Robin Brooks said: "It can be a lonely life as an innovator so the recognition implicit in this Award is a major boost to everyone involved with the company".

"We are also very grateful to our 85 customers for their contribution because we are consistently aware that our success comes only as a result of the successes they are achieving through their use of our products".