Expert Spotlight

Meet Jeroen Schellekens, Senior Director of Automation & Digitalization at GEA Heating & Refrigeration Technologies. In an exclusive interview, Jeroen sits down with us to share insights into the dynamic world of control systems and software solutions for industrial heating & cooling.

Welcome in, Jeroen. Your job title certainly has high relevance in today’s rapidly advancing technological world. Tell our readers about what your work entails.

Jeroen Schellekens: We are in the middle of a transformation of how we used to work. In the late 20th century, automation was the big thing as part of the Third Industrial Revolution. Now, the Fourth Industrial Revolution (a.k.a. Industry 4.0) is happening.

Big data is seen as the next large step to enable us to become better at what we do, conserve natural resources and reduce energy consumption. But without automation and digitalization we will not succeed in achieving these goals. Collecting machine data by reading the sensor values, preprocessing the data, and making the data available for analysis to derive models and algorithms, only works when both automation and digitalization are working hand in hand.

What sparked your interest in your chosen field of specialty and what was the journey like leading up to your current job role?

JS: As one who enjoys solving complex problems, being creative, feeding my curiosity, and being a little bit of a perfectionist, engineering as a career drew my attention.

I started as an automation engineer, writing software and developing hardware. Writing software is a very creative process. Automating things, so you do not have to do the same thing repeatedly, is what I am passionate about. Over time, by working in a team, enabling the team to become better by applying new technologies and pushing the use of standardization and modularization to improve the output, GEA gave me the opportunity to lead a team. Today, it is still the same creativity and curiosity that drives me, but also the opportunity to enable the team to be creative and innovative, supporting GEA Heating & Refrigeration Technologies to offer innovative solutions that help our customers to be successful.

GEA offers the advantage of combining extensive process knowledge along with expertise in integrated heating and refrigeration solutions to benefit customers throughout the world. What role does automation & digitalization play in these types of large-scale, industrial systems?

JS: To be able to analyze a large-scale industrial system, one needs to retrieve information from as many subsystems as possible, down to the single components. Automation & digitalization’s role is to provide solutions to do so. We contribute to the development of the framework needed for the digital revolution and enable customers to connect their plant to our GEA Cloud®. In this way, we can offer digital solutions to our customers that are built on our process knowledge and expertise for heating and refrigeration solutions. Additionally, we also develop and maintain the very powerful RTSelect software tool, which is used by customers and GEA sales engineers to select the right product for a specific application to meet the customer’s needs. The tool includes complex models to achieve the perfect fit.

As a worldwide corporation, GEA Group is strongly committed to reducing the effects of global warming and contributing to a sustainable future. How does your team support these strategic initiatives?

JS: The combination of our industry-leading GEA Omni control panel and our new digital solutions enable the customer to gain insights to optimize their processes to reduce their carbon footprint and energy consumption. Furthermore, RTSelect supports the customer in choosing the most energy-efficient GEA solution.

What advice would you give to students seeking a career in engineering?

JS: Keep asking questions, don’t take things for granted, and don’t give up easily. Be open for change. One thing is for sure — many tools and methods you use and learn today will become obsolete tomorrow. I wrote software in Fortran and Turbo Pascal. No further comment needed (grin).

Members of my team have diverse backgrounds and there is no one path to follow; however, they all possess the passion to seek innovative solutions and think creatively. By working in a team, it is not always a requirement to bring many years of experience to the table. Sometimes, newcomers can see things our seasoned experts don’t always see.

As the controls leader in the industry, how does GEA go about extending its lead and why is that important?

JS: By continuous improvement of our products, based on customer feedback, we have been able to stay at a very high level with our GEA Omni control panel and we are continuing to extend its capabilities and technological platform.

Developments in technology go very fast and new regulations force the industry to keep moving forward in the search of better solutions. We never stop working diligently to identify technological trends early on and gather customer feedback to develop exciting new products. Why is it important to stay ahead? Well, we want to retain our reputation as the innovative leader in our industry. This is beneficial to our industry, our customers, and our employees.

Is there anything new that you can tell us about?

JS: As some of our readers may know, we now offer variable Vi control for our screw compressors. This new, GEA Cloud-based product is GEA G-Plex® and it allows the compressor to adapt the discharge pressure to the system pressure preventing undercompression or overcompression, which increases the energy efficiency of the compressor. The complex control algorithms are included in the GEA Omni control panel, but our customers who only buy bare-shaft compressors and build their own compressor packages or chillers, often face difficulties getting the most out of the compressors because of the missing product knowledge. Therefore, in 2022 at the Chillventa in Nuremberg, Germany, we introduced the GEA G-Plex as an embedded control system for our bare- shaft compressors. It includes the Vi algorithms and can be integrated in the customer control concept. It is based on the latest technologies and it includes many other features in addition to Vi control.

Looking out five, 10, 15 years, how do you see your space evolving?

JS: I expect that the way we develop new products will change dramatically because of the possibilities offered by using cloud computing. Just look at how ChatGPT has already caused a huge change in the way we work, including how we write software. The path toward the point in time the change was noticeable took quite some years, but once it had reached a certain level, there was no way back and things changed rapidly. AI already plays a very important role in our lives, and it will do so even more in future. In part, it will help us to find better ways to produce products, utilize materials, and manage energy use.

Thank you for your insights, Jeroen. Continued success to you and your team in leading GEA’s path forward.

^{G-Plex® is a registered trademark in several countries worldwide.
Products and services may not be available in all areas.}