Pilot Plants
Design & Testing
Projects or Process Scale Up
Many clients come to us wanting chemical engineering process design assistance after they have done some level of work to confirm that their process technology should work in real life. Sometimes the available information will include well executed pilot plant trial data, process heat and materials balance information, and all the necessary physical and chemical properties fully defined.
Unfortunately, the more typical information consists of academic papers, some lab test data, and maybe some pseudo pilot plant information with stream property information only on the major products at best. The client usually has one or more technical staff members who are excellent at coming up with the innovative process idea, but lack the industrial process or design detail experience to bring the system to an efficiently functioning reality – that’s when we can help.
IncBio will evaluate this information, review the pilot plant setup, interview the client’s technical staff, and often perform a literature search to determine at what stage the process development is at and what information may be lacking.
Our engineers at IncBio have a great deal of experience with pilot plant testing and scale up designs. Both our operations and design experience allow us to make many critical improvement suggestions in areas such as materials of construction, equipment layout, operational safety considerations, operability and maintenance, process controls, and more. These inputs are folded into the scaled up design for the larger process. A rigorous process simulation model is then created to provide compete heat and material balance information, operating conditions, hydraulic pressure drop data, and more.
At this stage the IncBio will help evaluate the project’s potential technical and economic changes for success. Finally, assuming the project is deemed viable, P&IDs, equipment specifications, and a cost estimate of the new commercial sized process is generated. This package is then ready to be handed over for detail engineering, procurement, and construction (EPC).
Contact us today with your enquiry.