Perth company iPOM Pty Ltd has received a Commercial Emerging Technologies (COMET) innovation grant of $64,000.
Perth company iPOM Pty Ltd has received a Commercial Emerging Technologies (COMET) innovation grant of $64,000.
The company, based within Curtin University’s Centre of Excellence for Intelligent Process Operation Management (iPOM), has developed software to help rationalise large quantities of data gathered from process surveillance systems in industrial plants so as to better isolate equipment faults and prioritise maintenance activities.
iPOM co-director Professor Peter Lee said the COMET grant would be used to formulate a business plan to determine the product’s market penetration.
“The plan will look at the size of the market, what is the likely penetration, what are the avenues to market, how much it is going to cost us to take our prototype to full product,” he said. “That is essentially the work we are doing now.
“Most of this year we have been working on refining our prototype, making it a little more robust and also looking for ways to bring the product to market and thinking through that process.”
Professor Lee said the business plan would be presented to the company board next week, and had a five-year horizon.
“We have submitted our claim for a provisional PCT [patent cooperation treaty] application and the assignment of that has been given to iPOM Pty Ltd,” he said. “The company owns the technology and so the next stage is to do the evaluation of the business plan by the board.”
Professor Lee said company was seeking investor support to take the software to market and had been working closely with BP in Kwinana and Millennium Chemicals near Bunbury.
“We believe we have reduced the technical risk,” he told WA Business News. “There is always commercial risk but we believe also that some of this risk is no longer as large as it was since we have done so much work with BP in Kwinana and Millennium Chemicals.
“Millennium Chemicals have recently come back and asked for four provisional test licences.
“We are talking with BP, locally and in Chicago and London, about whether they want the investment or whether they just want to be first licensee.”
Professor Lee said the software allowed people to see patterns in the large quantities of data from alarm systems located throughout a large process plant.
“It visually presents data in a very convenient way that you can see,” he said. “We can find patterns in large amounts of data where you are interested in whether one variable is related to another.
“Based upon what we can see in the data, when you have a pattern and you see it next time you are aware of what is going to happen.”
