ABB Measurement & Analytics is among the world’s leading manufacturers and suppliers of smart instrumentation and analysers. It has 15 factories and service support centres, and works in around 60 countries, focusing strongly on industrial digital transformation. Jacques Mulbert, division president, ABB Measurement & Analytics, shares his views on the digital transformation of operations to ensure operational efficiency and lower production costs.
According to Mulbert, “Digitalisation improves visibility into business processes and ensures that with the help of the most accurate data available, processes are optimised.” For this, industrial companies require sensing at every step of the way; so measurement and analytics solutions are key. In most plants, there are hundreds of measuring points using many different measuring principles. ABB’s digitally enabled instrumentation and analyser solutions help plant operators connect the physical and the digital worlds.
ABB recently launched the ABB Ability™ SmartMaster, an asset performance management platform, which, together with its digital metering solution, AquaMaster 4, provides an end-to-end digital metering environment for water network operators. Customers can manage their assets in the field remotely, thereby reducing operational expenditure.
ABB works across many industries, including batteries and hydrogen. For instance, for Northvolt in Sweden, which is the world’s most advanced lithium-ion battery gigafactory, ABB is providing support with thousands of smart measurement devices. Battery production is a chemical process where accuracy and safety are critical. ABB’s instrumentation and force measurement portfolio is exceptionally qualified to address these needs.
ABB Measurement & Analytics has a long history in India serving industrial companies for more than five decades. Its instrumentation and analytical solutions are well known in industries such as power, oil and gas, petrochemicals, water and wastewater. It also supports the metals and pulp and paper industries with its solutions for flatness control, thickness gauge and tension measurement. Recently, ABB inaugurated its smart instrumentation factory in Bengaluru, thus increasing its capacity in India.
India is combating air pollution on many fronts. One of them is monitoring emission from industrial plants. Industrial plants can emit huge amounts of hazardous substances into the air. ABB has installed 60,000 continuous emissions monitoring systems in 50 countries across major industries, helping companies identify what components are polluting the air.
ABB’s emissions monitoring portfolio also comprises a suite of natural gas leak detection solutions, which use an innovative approach to gas detection, with sensitivity a thousand times greater and speed ten times faster than traditional equipment. In addition, ABB has been at the forefront of greenhouse gas sensing from space for over two decades. This year, ABB earned the Frost & Sullivan Company of the Year award in the global emissions monitoring systems industry.
Water is another challenge in India. Pipeline water losses in India are higher than 45 per cent. ABB has been supporting the sector by bringing solutions for district metering and leakage detection to India. In the 1990s, ABB introduced the world’s first battery-powered electromagnetic flowmeter for water distribution networks. It revolutionised the way water networks are managed by providing flow consumption data 24×7. AquaMaster4 Mobile Comms is the latest generation of this family and is the world’s first electromagnetic flowmeter with inbuilt bidirectional communication capabilities.
Decarbonisation is important to reduce the pace of global warming. It is very important in developed economies like Europe and North America and is increasingly important in growing economies like India and China. In Europe and North America, governments are helping companies to invest in decarbonisation with plans such as the EU Green Deal Industrial Plan and the Inflation Reduction Act. For instance, the US Department of Energy recently awarded ABB a substantial grant to design a methane monitoring platform that will aggregate, analyse, and visualise methane data from many sources for the first time.
EU companies are also obliged to demonstrate decarbonisation efforts. ABB is one such company. It has made significant progress in reducing its environmental footprint. It has reduced its greenhouse gas emissions by 43 per cent in 2022 by sourcing more power from renewables. At the industry level, ABB actively participates in European decarbonisation “best practices”. ABB is a member of the European Clean Hydrogen Alliance, which is focused on hydrogen technology. It also works with governments and other organisations to scale the production of hydrogen across the world.
According to Mulbert, “India is a growing market with a lot of potential for our business. The investment happening in India in infrastructure, water, sanitation, emissions monitoring and hydrogen is going to open up immense opportunities for measurement and analytical solutions. We have a vast portfolio to satisfy the growing demand for smart measurement solutions.”
