(180g) Invited Talk: An Accessible Methodology for Conducting Preliminary Techno-Economic Analyses (TEAs) for the Scale-up of Biomaterials

Increasing the process scale of promising biomaterials and biochemicals to produce kilograms of material is essential for advancing non-pharma, non-food, biomaterials R&D, but cost and performance both play a role in ever getting a material out of R&D and into a marketed product. This contribution describes the development of an Excel-based modeling tool and approach framework which adapts traditional chemical engineering process design methodologies to incorporate biological components for the rapid determination of preliminary techno-economic analysis (TEA) status during the production of microbially-fermented molecules at the BioMRL 2-4 scale in anticipation of scale-up performance at the BioMRL 5-6 scale and beyond. The model incorporates real-world capital and operational values based on an established pilot-scale, non-pharmaceutical, non-food, biomanufacturing facility. The present advancement presents a bridge between bench-scale innovation and pilot-scale performance expectations to assist early-scale researchers with understanding the cost and performance state of their technology, what the research goals should be to reach scalable maturity on the BioMRL metrics and reduce experimental and developmental risks, and what a potential break-even market price would be for the proposed process. While experimental confirmation of process performance through piloting is still essential, facilitating the ability of early-applied researchers to investigate and understand the impacts of process-critical variables early in the R&D process has been demonstrated to lead to bench-scale methodological improvements that were experimentally confirmed at the pilot-scale to increase product yields by 200%, reduce operational and feedstock costs by 60%, and decrease anticipated break-even market prices at scale from $1000/kg to <$1.00/kg.

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