These are the finalists of the ACHEMA Innovation Challenge

To implement AI solutions in the process industry as part of the KEEN platform, ABB AG challenged participants to develop an intelligent pipeline that pre-processes, cleans and labels collected data sets - and does so automatically. The two teams "D.A.T.A. Solutions" (Jesse Rejek, Philipus Putra, Yustinus Adrian, Ridzki Nugroho, Lingga Putra) and "Otto Normal" (Maximilian Kleine, Henrik Rosenberg) qualified for the finals.

The second challenge comes from TU Dortmund University: artificial intelligence is to be used in image recognition to determine the operating conditions in an extraction column with liquid-liquid flow. Here, the teams "KEEN Seekers" (Rafael De Cerqueira, Omar Bayomie) and "Data Barber" (Iwan Kornijez, Tim Sandermann, Samuel Kieling) take the final places.

Predictive maintenance in water management is the topic of the MAIN hack, organized jointly with HTAI. The monitoring of plant components is the subject of challenge set by  EnviroChemie. The two teams "MT DeepWater" (Karolina Weber, Marcus Linden, Oliver Balster, Philipp Wittenhorst, Hermann Wilde, Aike Sass, Rahul Soni) and "Okeanos" (Juliane Neumann, Henning Oppel, Benjamin Mewes, Önder Türksoy, Jonas Bechmann) convinced with their concepts and are in the final.

Evonik's challenge was to monitor the dosing of chemicals for optimal sewage sludge treatment. The teams "Banius - Intelligent Process Optimization" (Eske Hilbrands, Alexander Kekkenhoff, Robin Schröder, Hakan Bayer) and "PolyLyzer" (Michael Kocher, Thomas Theisen, Matthias Albers) took the final places in this task.

The ACHEMA Innovation Challenge was announced for the first time in 2020. A total of 183 innovation-minded thinkers took part. Some registered as teams from the outset, while others came together during the course of the competition via the challenge's communication platform. In workshops they received advice on their solutions. In addition to prize money of up to 1,500 euros, the winners also have the opportunity to spend a day at one of the participating companies.

[Note: In the original version, the challenges by Evonik and EnviroChemie were switched. This has been corrected 10 June 2021]