Industrial Engineering Student Builds AI Agent to Repair Chemical Plant Blueprints
Sierre Ternoey, E, industrial engineering, developed an agentic AI tool during a research co-op in Germany that reads error reports and automatically fixes chemical plant process flow sheets.
This article originally appeared on Northeastern Global News. It was published by Matthew Ponsford. Main photo: Sierre Ternoey took on this major challenge without having taken a chemical engineering course. Courtesy Photo
Northeastern student in Germany builds AI tool to fix chemical plants’ blueprints
When plans for chemical plants fail, it takes time and expertise to put them right. This engineer’s agentic AI can clear up mistakes quickly.
When Northeastern University industrial engineering student Sierre Ternoey started her research position in Aachen, Germany, she was challenged to fix an issue that frustrates chemical engineers worldwide.
The industrial plants that make cleaning agents, clothing fabrics and countless other products are designed using sophisticated software that lays out a “chemical flow sheet,” Ternoey, explained, essentially a “blueprint for how a chemical factory is going to work.”
This software simulates production processes to ensure chemical ingredients are mixed and recycled, while useful products are separated. But first drafts typically don’t work perfectly.
“What you get back is a long, dense report telling you something broke without telling you why,” Ternoey told Northeastern Global News. “Sorting out the cause takes real experience, a lot of time” and, in practice, she added, a ton of guesswork.
Using skills she acquired in a first-year course at Northeastern, she was able to produce an AI agent that could read the report and diagnose the problem – and then fix the flow sheet, to hand back a working simulation.
“In the best configuration, the agent passed 26 of 30 test cases,” she said, meaning it found a solution without disturbing the engineer’s original design choices.
For Ternoey, her experience was the fulfillment of a course that had taught both hands-on tools and problem-solving initiative – all skills she needed, she admitted, as she’d “never taken a chemical engineering course.”
Innovation learned at Northeastern
Ternoey grew up in the German-speaking region of Switzerland and had all the language skills she needed for her semester at RWTH Aachen University, Germany’s largest technical school. But the industrial engineering undergraduate arrived with some trepidation, she said.
“I was definitely excited and optimistic, but I got here when it was kind of very dark and gloomy weather. It had snowed, I didn’t know a single person in this town, and I was definitely nervous that I wasn’t going to be able to cut it at my co-op,” she said.
But these fears were quickly put to rest as she found a small community that welcomed her into salsa lessons and found her a place to continue training in Taekwondo, which she competed in while on Northeastern’s Boston campus.
Read full story at Northeastern Global News