“Scaling up” may have new meaning this summer if you’ve seen the blockbuster Jurassic World. Those scientists can’t keep their hands off the dino DNA and engineer one big, bad and nasty scaled-up dinosaur.
Yet when we focused on scaling up process in our latest BHS e-newsletter, A&SoF, we were talking about process scale-up for specialty chemicals and bioenergy.
Our own “Process Scale-Up from Demonstration Batch Filtration to Commercial Continuous Filtration” details a process filtration approach developed for each technology stage-gate and emphasizes how to avoid the cookie cutter approach.
Structure your processes
Whether at lab, pilot, demonstration, or commercial scale it’s important to train yourself to be a better decision maker. Using checklists, formulas and structured procedures are your best bet.
We engineers are under stress during the scaling up process (as our families at home might attest), yet it’s important to take the time to think about all of the process issues before moving to the next stage. Give your team time to reflect (as Holmes and Watson often did) to insure the premises are sound (process definition, requirements, and testing objectives), you’ve understood the critical process parameters, and to end up with the optimum process filtration solution.
In the newsletter, we also share David Edward’s CEP article about the stage-gate method in bioenergy as he explains differences between traditional chemical process and bioenergy project scale-ups. After all, another good habit of a process engineer is to be well-informed.
Want to learn more about filtration principles? Join one of BHS’ upcoming Lunch & Learn Filtration Seminars or let me know you’re coming to one of my upcoming Presentations. See you there.