Physics-grounded AI, verified by the engineers who run the plant.
IVL put Orbital on one of the largest MTBE units in the world, then asked its own engineers to find the gaps. They found reasons to expand it instead.
Port Neches, Texas
F5 PO/MTBE unit
Refining and petrochemicals
31 August 2026
process sections verified and signed off by IVL’s engineers
quality targets inside the agreed tolerance
from kick-off to sign-off
The challenge
A world-scale unit, not a contained corner.
F5 at Port Neches is one of the largest single MTBE units anywhere. IVL put Orbital on the whole unit rather than a contained corner of the plant, to stress-test its full capability.
6
tightly coupled process sections across 2 production chains
15,000+
tags and instruments
Decades
of knowledge in documents, historians and people
How it was tested
What it takes to earn an engineer’s trust.
Orbital was trained on F5’s own DCS and lab history, constrained by the physics of the process, and answers only from that unit’s data. Then IVL set the bar: instead of closing testing at four weeks, prove you understand all six sections, prompt by prompt.
All six process sections signed off
Feed Prep
Signed off
PEROX
Signed off
EPOX
Signed off
PO Purification
Signed off
TBA
Signed off
MTBE
Signed off
From kick-off to sign-off
Kick-off
4+ years of DCS and lab history connected
Verification
Engineers on site, section by section
Signed off
Under 5 months from kick-off
Live on F5
Next phase, in progress
Most gaps traced back to source documents that differed from the unit as it runs today. Each one was logged, owned and resolved within days. By the final sessions, Orbital was helping the team bring the plant's records fully up to date.
The results
Accurate, and advisory by design.
On held-out test data measured against lab results, the typical error sat inside the agreed tolerance on every quality target across the PO, TBHP and MTBE streams.
Never writes set-points or trips equipment. Alarms and safety systems stay untouched.
States its confidence, and says when it doesn’t know.
Operators keep full control of the unit at all times.
An engineer implements any change themselves.
In their words
“Our engineers pushed this system, looking for gaps and testing its limits. Instead of finding reasons not to use it, they found reasons to expand it. That is why we are expanding our partnership with Applied Computing.”
Mark Holden
Chief Manufacturing and Technology Officer, CPET, Indorama Ventures
“The future of manufacturing won’t be defined simply by having more data or better technology. It will be defined by how quickly we turn insight into action and action into learning. Our partnership with Applied Computing at Port Neches is an opportunity to prove that capability where it matters most, in the operation.”
Chad Anderson
Chief Manufacturing and Technology Officer, Indovinya, Indorama Ventures
What’s next
From verified intelligence to operating value.
F5 now has a model of itself, built from its own history and verified by the people who run it. Both companies are working towards live deployment, with more than $4M in projected benefits across the engagement.
The benefit figure is a projection, not a realised saving.
Read the full case study
5 pages on the unit, the system, the verification and the guardrails.