(488f) Relevance of Solids Processing Expertise to the Chemical Industry – Past, Present and Future - a Perspective from Dow Chemical

This talk is focusing on the historic perspective of solids handling at Dow. Specially, design and scale up of unit operations will be discussed and how understanding the processes fundamentals had to be developed. Due to the nature of solids, it was important to conduct meaningful laboratory experiments coupled with fundamentals to successfully scale up or trouble shoot processes on a plant scale. However, today there are a variety of tools available which can augment or even replace some of the experiments necessary to gain the understanding. We are discussing a view of current tools for process analysis and design, the challenges and use of computational tools for individual unit operations using the discrete element method, finite element analysis and computational fluid dynamics as well as process simulations using flow sheeting tools. Besides the computational tools we will discuss advances in laboratory and process instrumentation, including a wide range of particle and powder characterization tools and methods which enable process intensification. Further, we will discuss the needs for more powerful computational tools, how the aspect of sustainability is considered and the need for rapid innovation in the field.