Presentation: Aurubis: How the PI System Can Support an Energy Management System in a Copper Company

Headquartered in Hamburg, Germany, the Aurubis group is a leading global copper producer. Their core business is producing copper cathodes from copper concentrates and processing scrap into continuous cast wire rod, shapes and rolled products all of which is very energy-intensive. Aurubis' business challenges are to:

• Increase energy efficiency
• Minimize energy costs
• Protect the environment
• Get reliable data needed e.g. for CO2-trading

To ensure that these objectives were met, Aurubis implemented an Energy Management System (EnMS) meeting DIN EN ISO 50001 criteria. The Aurubis EnMS incorporates more than 3000 measurements, like flow-, pressure- or temperature-measurement - all of which have to be integrated and monitored. With the PI System, Aurubis was able to integrate the large number of measurements to provide an overview of all energy flows, visualized in PI ProcessBook.

Using data from the PI System an external program calculates monthly values of all flow measurements and calculates energy values and costs to costs centers for all type of energy. The program also creates energy reports to provide an overview of the use of energy and energy costs.

Until today, sensor failure was not systematically detected; operators had to select every measurement that they wanted to control. Now, the EnMS provides analysis that works in the background to create a more structured method to detect sensor failure. The last important point is the possibility to detect incorrect measurements and to validate data.

This presentation will cover the EnMS solution, the detection of measurement failure based on the PI System Asset Framework (AF), and the value that an energy management system provides to Aurubis.