How Arbaflame is taking a scalable approach to industrial innovation with Cognite

Arbaflame used Industrial DataOps software provided by Cognite, including Cognite Data Fusion™, to build a data foundation prepared to power the company’s growth ambitions in renewable energy and biochemicals.

Make operational data available and usable

Arbaflame recycles biowaste from sustainable forestry into renewable energy and biochemicals. The company neutralizes coal plants used for balancing power by replacing coal with Arbacore pellets from residual waste (sawdust) from sawmills practicing sustainable forestry.

As byproducts from the production process, Arbaflame is also developing chemicals used in bioplastics, food flavoring, polymers, solvents, and fish feed.

Arbaflame has built its first full-scale commercial plant, called ArbaOne, to verify its business model. Located outside of Kongsvinger, Norway, the plant has an annual production capacity of 70,000 metric tons of Arbacore pellets. It also produces furfural for commercial use (and acetone, methane gas, and methanol, which are currently used for internal energy production).

Arbaflame’s industrial architecture includes more than 20 different equipment packages that all contain operational data critical to understanding how the plant operates. To scale its offering, Arbaflame needed a technology partner that would help the company make its data accessible and trustworthy. 

Improving access to operational data would help Arbaflame:

• Access historical data and performance from the ArbaOne plant and use that information to optimize production and enable more efficient business ramp-up.
• Create a live data pipeline and a contextualized data model, and set up data visualization and analytical models.
• Equip experts with the competence and tools to scale and build new digital solutions, and democratize data to enable citizen data scientists to create insights.

A data foundation powered by Cognite Data Fusion™

Arbaflame worked with Cognite to make the data generated at the ArbaOne plant available, usable, and valuable.

Over a period of eight weeks, the two companies worked together to ingest operational data from AVEVA Plant SCADA, engineering diagrams and flowcharts, data sheets, and a 3D model of the ArbaOne plant into the Industrial DataOps platform Cognite Data Fusion™. 

Cognite Data Fusion™ makes the data available to all Arbaflame employees, giving them trusted data to build solutions and applications with speed and at scale. 

Users can create personalized dashboards that alert them to deviations not captured in their control systems (such as energy usage or potential quality issues) use historical data to quickly identify why units aren't performing at optimal levels, and get to root cause analysis faster—and from anywhere—to troubleshoot complex operational issues.

Other benefits include:

• Access to assets, time series, sensors, and alarms without user limitations.
• Data analytics, exploration, and visualization using Cognite applications and features such as AIR, Charts, and Fusion, and third-party apps such as Grafana.
• Clickable engineering diagrams connected to assets and time series data.
• Continuous data quality monitoring, including automatic reboots during downtime and health monitoring.

Actionable data and insights for all

Cognite Data Fusion™ eliminates time spent on manual data contextualization, offline data discovery, ingestion of data, developing a hosting environment, or preparing application data for consumption.

After deploying Cognite Data Fusion™, Arbaflame has:

• Visualized key parameters in Grafana dashboards and made them available to operators in the ArbaOne control room.
• Provided access to subsets of data to certain third-party suppliers to help the company improve the production process.
• Extracted and visualized key performance indicators (KPIs).
• Democratized data access so that Arbaflame employees can conduct ad hoc analyses to solve production issues without assistance from IT experts.

Arbaflame estimates that Cognite Data Fusion™ will help the company cut the time its experts spend making sense of data by 50%. 

The eight-week project was the first step of Arbaflame's digital journey. Working with Cognite the company has already scoped 22 use cases that it plans to solve with Cognite’s software. The asset hierarchy created in Cognite Data Fusion™ is standardized, scalable, and applicable for new production plants, meaning that Arbaflame is well-positioned to scale its digital ambitions in the future.

From day one after we went live, the data became much more accessible and manageable for the team, and we have saved a lot of time when doing analyses. Our engineers are enabled.

Håvard Knappskog, automation architect at Arbaflame