I lead a course on Process Scale-up last May. I always learn new aspects while giving this course, I will share with you 4 learning points I took away from this course:
- This time I learned from the course participants that a company who lacked process concept design capability went to a process system integrator (PSI) to obtain a useful concept design.
- I also learned of a different company who had concept design capabilities, still went to PSI outside their industry branch to get an unfamiliar perspective. They called this a “cold-eye-designer.”
- A third learning point was that a company with only batch processes would like to have an outline on how to scale-up from batch to continuous processes. The company only had batch processes and their scale-up method was empirical scale-up. Other scale-up methods such as concept design, modelling and model validation was outside their view.
- A fourth learning point is that the start-up time estimate can also be used to estimate start-up cost. A simple estimate is to assume that during start-up nothing is produced. So, all processing cost during start-up are not recovered by sales. This cost item should then be added to the investment cost and a budget should be reserved to cover the cost during start-up.
Leading a course means we learn from each other!