(146c) Piloting to Prevent Failure

Pilot plants are a key risk mitigation tool in commercial process development. If properly designed, they can become a test bed for the mitigation of risks related to the fundamental underlying process (reaction engineering, catalyst deactivation/regeneration, byproduct accumulation, recycle stream management etc.). They can also be used to resolve issues related to materials of construction, scale dependant operations such as filtration, and other parameters which are difficult or impossible to resolve solely with recourse to the literature or simulations.

In this presentation, a number of pilot plant projects across a diverse swath of the chemical process industry are examined, demonstrating how certain learnings from the pilot program design or execution mitigated key scale-up risks, identified new problems not previously anticipated, or identified a key roadblock to commercialization for a new process technology.