An R&D Perspective on the Scale-Up of Heterogeneous Catalysts

The scale up of heterogeneous catalysts is an important step in enabling the profitable industrial production of chemicals to benefit society. The first part of this talk will discuss some of the common pitfalls and challenges associated with translating laboratory discoveries into practical commercial solutions, highlighting both technical and business challenges that researchers may encounter as they seek to reduce their inventions to practice. In the second part of the talk, we will discuss how these types of challenges were encountered and addressed during the development and scale up of a hydrogenation catalyst at Dow and describe how careful application of catalysis and reaction engineering fundamentals was critical to enabling the successful production of the catalyst at scale.