Gideon Botes

Senior Manager Digital Development at Sasol

Gideon Botes spent the first part of his career at an industrial R&D center being involved in both fundamental and applied research, as well as technology development. His main technical focus spanned the fields of catalysis, chemical reaction engineering and the modelling of chemical reactors, striving to combine knowledge across these fields to provide integrated insights and solutions to reactive systems. He later became an Intellectual Property Technical Advisor, before assuming the position of leading a technology innovation team. His role over the past five years has been to head the digital development at Sasol Secunda Operations, a mega-scale chemical complex.
He holds a Bachelor’s degree and a Master’s degree (related to reactor modelling) from the University of Stellenbosch, a Structured Master’s degree in Catalysis from the University of Cape Town, and a Ph.D. (related to chemical reaction engineering) from the Technische Universiteit Eindhoven. He is also presently serving as an extraordinary professor at the Department of Chemical Engineering, University of Stellenbosch.
Gideon is also the opinionated husband of a headstrong wife, and father of an opinionated, headstrong son.

Title: Positioning data science and machine learning as a new and specialised engineering tool in the chemical industry

Machine learning and related techniques has had much less impact on the chemical industry compared to some other sectors, like finance, retail, etc. Despite claims that this is due to a conservative industry reluctant to embrace new methodologies, our analysis revealed that transferring the methodologies and execution models that has proven successful in other sectors directly onto chemical processes is technically flawed. Instead, a new sub-discipline is evolving that combines data science and machine learning with traditional engineering expertise, namely chemical process fundamentals, process control principles and numerical techniques. Some case studies will be presented as illustration of how this can be practically achieved and implemented. The lecture will also briefly touch on the execution model as an important success factor for the adoption of digital solutions.