Ian, welcome to our conference. Could you please summarize what Bühler is doing and give us some insights into why sustainability is so important for your company?
Bühler is a 164-year-old family-owned company. We produce technologies for the food industry and sustainable mobility. With our products we supply many of the big brands in the food, feed, and automotive industries. We have realized that the biggest impact we can have against sustainability challenges like climate change is to ensure that our products are the most efficient, deliver the highest yield, and the lowest CO2 footprint for our customers. To achieve that, we offer physical products and new developments, along with services and digitalization that enables us to work on a vast installed base of technologies to reduce their CO2 footprint as well. We have a clear pledge in the company that by 2025 we would have solutions available across the 15 key value chains where our customers play, that would reduce energy, waste, and water consumption by 50%. And 2025 is tomorrow!
The owners of Bühler are known for their passion in making the company sustainable and a lot is invested into this. Tell us more about that.
One of the advantages, I believe, is being a family company where the owners are extremely committed to making the organization an innovation leader. We collaborate with the best partners to ensure our innovation is as effective as possible. Additionally, long-term thinking and planning for the benefit of future generations, are core values of any family, and we strive to integrate these principles into our company’s culture.
As a CTO, how do you implement sustainability in the development process?
We always address the hotspots first, targeting those with the highest CO2 footprint - which are typically thermal processes. Another area where we can make a significant contribution is by ensuring that everything from the field is turned into value, is utilized effectively. For example, if rice is broken, it often falls out of the food value chain, preventing this important staple food from reaching the people who need it the most.
How does simulation help you to follow the guidelines of sustainability in the product development process? Can you give us an example?
I will stick with the rice example: when you have brown rice, it has bran on the outside, but consumers typically prefer white rice. The whitening process, however, can be very destructive and damaging, so you can lose a lot of products. What we've been doing is using physics-based models-to understand how we can reduce the brokens out of that process.
When it comes to engineering, we always incorporate safety margin into our designs. However, the better the simulation, the more we can reduce the safety margin. Then you don’t oversize designs and use too much of material when you create a technology or a process. Equally, you can reduce failure rates and make sure food is processed when it’s fresh. If we can transition to using digital twins with simulation and IoT, we can provide remote services to ensure that production lines run at optimal efficiency at all times, reducing the need to fly engineers around the world for issues that could be predicted.
Thank you for this example. At CADFEM we are proud to be a long-term partner of Bühler for Digital Engineering. So here is my last question: What do you expect from us as technology partner now and in the future?
When adopting any technology more broadly across a company, a big challenge is not the technology itself, but rather changing the culture and encouraging adoption. How do we lower the barrier of entry for everybody, and democratize the use of the latest technologies, and demonstrate their value? There is always some degree of discomfort when adopting new technologies. The interest there is how do we embark on this journey together, where we support the transition to more widespread use of simulation, where it really makes sense within our company.
Get the full interview with Dr. Ian Roberts on our YouTube channel!
CADFEM Conference 2024, Keynote “Simulation as an enabler for more sustainable processing solutions”. Watch now!
