Successful Scale-up and Piloting - Overcoming Challenges Other than Obvious Technical Issues

Scale up and piloting is one of the most challenging steps of bringing a new product or process to market. It’s a technology transfer process between individuals from different parts of an organization; possibly from different organizations; even from different countries.

Scaling up a process by a factor of hundreds or even thousands from laboratory glassware to pilot scale equipment has many expected technical issues to resolve, such as heat and mass transfer differences. But there are also personal and company cultural issues involved such as plant personnel interacting with corporate development staff, chemical engineers interacting with chemists. The knowledge and information to be assimilated and transferred is usually more important than the material actually produced in the piloting phase.

This presentation will touch on several of these non-technical issues, based on the author’s experiences in scale up and transfer of products with several organizations’ pilot facilities.