Understanding Advanced Process Control
Discover how lessons from decades of automotive innovation can accelerate
digitalization and performance in powder production.
In industrial manufacturing, small variations in environmental conditions can disrupt operations, causing inefficiencies, wasted energy, and inconsistent product quality. Traditionally, human operators manually adjust settings to compensate for these changes, but this approach is slow, reactive, and prone to human error.
Through this white paper, you will learn what Advanced Process Control (APC) is and why it plays a critical role in modern manufacturing, drawing inspiration from the intelligent automation in automotive innovations.
Advanced Process Control (APC) solves this problem by using intelligent automation to continuously adjust and optimize industrial processes in real time. Just like modern cars automatically regulate fuel injection for maximum efficiency, APC enables spray drying systems to self-optimize, ensuring stable production and energy savings without manual intervention. Since 2018, GEA has been offering its APC solution, GEA OptiPartner®.
The traditional two-stage spray dryers from GEA were once the industry standard, but they had limitations in producing powders with optimal properties. The resulting powders were typically spherical, non-agglomerated, and often difficult to dissolve due to weak inter-particle adhesion. To overcome these challenges, GEA introduced the three-stage MSD® and FSD® dryers in the early 1980s, marking a significant leap in spray drying technology. These systems enhanced product quality, improved energy efficiency, and reduced facility space requirements, making dust-free, easy-to-reconstitute powders widely accessible for industries such as:
Yet, with greater complexity comes more variables to control. The increased number of control points and time delays in fluidized layers means that traditional PID (Proportional Integral Derivative) control loops struggle to maintain optimal running conditions when disturbances occur.
This is where APC comes in.
The comparison between MPC-based APC (GEA OptiPartner®) and conventional PID control assumes that, before the change at t = 0, the system was stable and optimized.
To illustrate the limitations of conventional feedback control, a simulation was conducted on a three-stage spray drying system to observe its response to a disturbance as a sudden drop in ambient air humidity.
Click the video below to view the simulation in action:
The key performance indicators were:
Based on the graph, the following conclusions can be drawn:
As a conclusion, the simulation clearly shows that APC eliminates the need for manual corrections, increases production capacity, and prevents energy waste.
Bridging industries: what Spray Drying can learn from the road ahead
As the simulation shows, APC offers clear advantages such as, greater efficiency, consistency, and responsiveness with no manual intervention. So why hasn’t it become the standard across spray drying operations? To answer that, it helps to look outside our industry. By exploring how the automotive sector tackled similar challenges in process control and efficiency, we can uncover valuable lessons that could accelerate APC adoption in spray drying.
The 1973 oil crisis forced the automotive industry to rethink fuel efficiency. As consumer demand shifted toward better miles per gallon (Mpg), automakers responded in a phased approach:
DFI was a major breakthrough because it precisely controlled fuel supply in real-time, optimizing combustion and eliminating inefficiencies of older carburetor-based systems. This marked a shift not just toward more sophisticated mechanical engineering, but toward a new level of intelligent control over existing equipment.
✔ Mpg increased from 12 in the 1970s to 20+ today.
✔ Every modern gasoline/diesel vehicle now operates with DFI.
Despite being introduced over 25 years ago, Model Predictive Control (MPC)-based Advanced Process Control (APC) is still only applied in about 25% of industrial spray drying operations. In contrast, the automotive industry has achieved 100% adoption of Direct Fuel Injection (DFI) by demonstrating clear efficiency gains and cost benefits.
This raises a critical question: What is holding APC back in spray drying, and how can the industry overcome these challenges?
In the next episodes of our Whitepaper series, we will explore:
The automotive industry proved that process control innovation can drive higher efficiency, improved quality, and reduced energy consumption, and spray drying has the same opportunity.
With solutions like GEA OptiPartner®, the industry has the technology to make APC the standard for efficiency and process optimization, just as DFI did for fuel efficiency. Learn more on GEA OptiPartner® Powder Plants.