Never Let a Good Crisis Go to Waste:  RAPID RACER AMPD and the Opportunity to Accelerate Process Development – An Update

As announced on March 7, 2022, the RAPID Manufacturing Institute^® (an AIChE entity and one of the Manufacturing USA Institutes) was awarded $4.64MM by the U.S. Dept. of Commerce’s National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) to both develop a methodology to accelerate process development and also develop a testbed for domestic manufacturing of critical pharmaceutical ingredients. The testbed will be located in the underserved Appalachian region in South Charleston, WV. The project is funded under the American Rescue Plan Act of 2021, also known as the COVID-19 Stimulus Package.

The test bed program, currently under development, presents an opportunity to accelerate chemical process development with modular skids and demonstrate its potential for rapid deployment of distributed manufacturing. Work is also underway to deliver an accelerated process development methodology to support the reshoring efforts that may take place during the next crisis/pandemic. We will present the learnings from our benchmarking survey of the AIChE Process Development Division on the current state of process development and how they are being codified into a stagewise methology for accelerated process development. Current work being done to explore the feasiblity of using a Damkohler number as a potential unifying tool for both the traditional reactor application as well as extension to downstream processing will also be discussed. An update on the test bed program will also be provided.