Importance of Pilot Plant in Chemical Industry
Technological advancements and innovation to scale up production are common in any industry, whether mechanical, pharmaceutical, chemical, or industrial. As they say, change is the only constant! And if you want to stay ahead of your competition in business, you got to accept the change. With cutting-edge technology being introduced, there is always a scope for a new player to emerge, hence the only way out is to innovate and lead. But, is it that easy to just innovate and implement changed processes and methodologies? Not really.
Large-sized production and processing plant involves high risk and high investments, and they need to be cautiously designed and developed.
For a large size company, implementing the innovation straight from the lab could be highly unsafe considering problematic mixing, product output, and slow or hard-to-control reactions. Moreover, huge investments and time involved make things even more complicated. While some issues can be addressed in simulations, the physical version that runs in the real world will often behave differently than the simulations predict. Hence, they need a different approach to build pilot plants and demonstrate plants to test the feasibility and practical implementation of the production plant.
The term pilot plant or demonstration plant is used interchangeably, but a demonstration module is often considered larger and more commercial than a pilot skid.
What is a Pilot Plant?
The pilot plant, as the name suggests, is the first sight of how the real plant will look like. A pilot plant is a smaller version of the plant which is operated to find out the behavior of the process before using it on a large-scale industrial production. It acts as a system for hazard identification before full-scale production takes place. A pilot plant allows you to collect actual data that can ensure the smooth function of your full-scale production plant. It allows you to experiment with inputs, outputs, processing time, etc to streamline your process. In some cases, a pilot plant may be of an optimal size that can produce specialty products in low quantities. You can stop at the pilot plant scale, produce plenty of products, and forgo a larger financial undertaking until the market demand increases. Pilot plants are also intended for learning, they typically are more flexible, possibly at the expense of the economy. Some pilot plants are built in laboratories using stock lab equipment, while others require substantial engineering efforts, cost millions of dollars, and are custom-assembled and fabricated from process equipment, instrumentation, and piping. They can also be used to train personnel for a full-scale plant.
Goals for Building and Operating Pilot Plants -
1] Process Scale-Up: Process scale-up for technology is one of the most common reasons to build a pilot plant. Scale-up involves the collection of data to design a larger, full-scale production plant or occasionally an intermediate-sized demonstration plant based on the pilot plant operation. Some aspects of a pilot plant scale-up directly while others scale up in a more complex manner. In today’s environment, pilot plants can also bring real-life data into sophisticated modeling techniques. With the availability of computer-aided design and complex modeling capabilities, pilot plants have become a tool for testing and refining computational models. A mathematical model is developed for the pilot plant and its validity and consistency are checked by comparing the computational results with experimental observations. Once a sufficiently reliable model has evolved that accurately predicts the results for a wide range of operating parameters, the computational model can be more reliably used as a tool in the development of a larger or full-scale plant.
2] Validate the full process for technical purposes: A complex process is divided into a series of unit operations during design. Each unit operation is modeled and studied individually for designing the relevant components of a plant. A pilot plant helps in testing if equipment and control concepts perform as desired once unit operations are tied together. This is very important if recycle streams are involved as the pilot plant will demonstrate if impurities are building in recycle streams and causing operational problems. Full plant operation also helps in defining the safe operating envelope within which the plant must be operated to ensure compliance with safety codes and regulations.
3] Validate the process for economic and business purposes: New technologies and products being marketed for commercialization are justifiably scrutinized by investors and/or senior techno-economic-chemical-design-technology-improvement. A pilot plant provides proof of concept to mitigate risks and allay investor concerns. A company can more accurately estimate raw material costs, production costs, and process yield from the operation of a pilot plant. These numbers are often key factors that determine the economic feasibility of a project.
4] Produce samples for quality and performance evaluation: Small product quantities are often needed for internal evaluation and testing against quality standards. Customers may also request samples before approval. At this stage in the development process, a larger production facility may not even exist, and sample quantities are often too large for lab-scale production. A pilot plant can produce these samples in quantity using a process resembling the ultimate, commercial process, leading to more representative samples than can normally be produced in a laboratory. Furthermore, after the creation of a larger scale plant and the commercial introduction of products, a pilot plant can allow the full-scale plant to continue its commercial operations without interruptions from R&D for product evaluation of different products or new product recipes.
5] Market development production: New products that do not have an established market can be tricky to launch. Initial sales are slow and do not justify the installation and operation of a large-scale production facility, and often potential customers need to test the materials on a production scale before they can commit to product acceptance. In this market development phase, a pilot or demonstration plant can provide larger-scale samples or small commercial quantities to bridge the gap as the market is being developed and proven. This mode can continue until it makes economic and market sense to pursue a larger, commercial-scale plant. Understanding a project’s goals is of utmost importance before building a pilot plant. This understanding is especially important when a team has not just one, clear-cut objective or reason, but multiple reasons. A combination of reasons can add complexity to decision-making. Therefore, the team should have a solid grasp on all of the reasons for building a pilot plant before design and build. To do otherwise could result in significant delays and additional costs to the program.
Pilot plants are extensively used as a part of chemical industries in it’s various applied branches. Let’s take a look at one such application here!
Pilot Plant in Food and Beverage Industry
In food processing, there’s little room for error. Consistent production, tight temperature controls, accurate batching, and rigorous quality control are required to deliver consumable foods that not only taste right but also meet FDA standards. Food processing systems including mixing in, blending in, beverage manufacturing process, etc increase yields and reduce costs without sacrificing quality. From sanitary batching systems to pilot plants for the formulation, food processing equipment minimizes bacteria growth to ensure food safety while increasing yields and reducing costs. Equipments such as tanks, Clean in Place (CIP), and pigging systems guarantees the systems remain sanitary between production runs.
Wet Pilot Plant, Dry Pilot Plant, and Food Safety Pilot Plant contain equipment used in food manufacturing facilities around the world. These state-of-the-art plants offer research and teaching opportunities for Food Science faculty and students. The Pilot Plants are ideal for the evaluation of new ingredients, formulations, and processes on a small scale, and for short course laboratories and equipment demonstrations. The facilities can accommodate multiple activities simultaneously. The floor plans are open and most of the equipment are on wheels. The utility stations positioned throughout each plant allow flexibility for short and long-term projects.
The Wet Pilot Plant is designed for processing fluid and wet foods, with an emphasis on dairy products, fruits and vegetables. Major equipment & processes supported are -
- Cheese Manufacture
- Dairy Products Manufacture
- Fruit & Vegetable Processing
- HTST Pasteurizer
- Ice Cream Manufacture
- Jet Cooker
- Juice Processing
- Retort
- Steam Kettles
- UHT/HTST Processor
- Yogurt and Cultured Products Manufacture
General Features -
- 4000 sq. ft. net processing space
- Additional dry storage
- Dedicated walk-in cooler and freezer
- Overhead door and lift to enable semi-trailers to deliver equipment and supplies directly into the Pilot Plant
The Dry Pilot Plant is designed for processing products in a low relative humidity environment, with an emphasis on powders and confectionery products. Major equipment & processes supported are -
- Chocolate Processing
- Conches
- Continuous Mixer
- Freeze Dryer
- Powder Processing
- Roller Refiner
- Spray dryer
General Features -
- 2000 sq. ft. net processing space
- Additional dry storage
- Dedicated walk-in cooler and freezer
- Overhead door and lift to enable semi-trailers to deliver equipment and supplies directly into the Pilot Plant
The Food Safety Pilot Plant is designed for challenge and validation studies in a controlled environment. It is a CDC BioSafety Level 2 rated facility. Major equipment & processes supported are -
- Hand-held Sprayer
- Hepa-filtered Biological Hood
- Smoker
- Vacuum Packager
- Dry Cabinet
General Features -
- 900 sq. ft. net processing space.
- Access through Decontamination Room, equipped with lockers, changing room, shower, and laundry facilities.
- Adjacent to 900 sq. ft. Media Preparation Room equipped with culture freezer, autoclaves, and dishwasher Pass-through autoclave (to Media Preparation Room).
- All waste streams are directed to a heat digester.
Common Utilities -
- Coldwater (city)
- Hot water
- Steam (medium pressure)
- Air
- Vacuum
- Natural gas
- RO\DI water
- Electric (120 and 240-volt single phase, 208, 230, 240, and 460 volt 3-phase)
- Ethernet access
How to get the Optimal Pilot Plant?
An investment in a pilot plant often is an important step for successfully scaling up a product. The pilot plant can provide critical technical knowledge of how to build a large-scale plant. Indeed, a properly engineered pilot plant delivers important insights. Discovering faulty assumptions and errors on a small scale can avoid financial, safety, and technical risks in subsequent larger units. A pilot plant essentially is an evolution of your product to increased scale. A pilot plant’s primary objective is to demonstrate the chemical and physical stability of a new production technique. Modern modeling software offers a quick and iterative way to find optimal design parameters — but models contain many assumptions that often have vast unknown effects on chemical processes and carry an inherent risk.
But how can you ensure your pilot plant is optimally designedto deliver the correct insights?
Start Right
Laboratory-scale data are a small piece of the information puzzle required to design a successful pilot plant. You’ll need a variety of other essential details:
Commercial information - This often is an afterthought but is extremely important to a project’s success. This category includes goals that establish a budget, timeline, expected lifecycle operating cost, and desired return-on-investment for the project. The spend and timeline targets will affect everything from the operating ranges you can use to the suppliers available. Additional commercial aspects of a project include environmental permitting requirements and site selection. Early site selection also is critical because a pilot plant must be designed for its destination. Are all the utilities (steam, water, nitrogen, etc.) required by your process available on site? What are the dimensions of the available space your unit must fit into? Do need heating/ventilation/air-conditioning and electrical services already exist? Do you know seismic zoning or wind loads?
Technical information - Establish a clearly defined basis of design first. It’s important to ensure all stakeholders agree on the production goals before you begin designing the details. Disagreement on the pilot plant’s goals, desired rate of production, finished product specifications or raw materials to use can delay or even derail the project. Once stakeholders agree on those basic inputs and outputs, key information to gather includes:
• desired operating ranges (pressure and temperature) for each phase (e.g., heating, separation, cooling, etc.);
• order of component addition;
• all process steps with technical details including any required separating or blending of products for final use;
• mixing, heating and cooling times; and
• distillation or drying rates (if required).
A lab-scale unit can provide certain key information, particularly data on chemical composition at different points in the production process. These details are important to the pilot plant design and define the product evaluation and validation steps.
Additional information - Usually, scale-up isn’t performed in-house. Most often, you must enlist an outside engineering firm. Consider the areas that your in-house team that lacks sufficient knowledge and fill in the gaps with outside resources. One common in-house deficiency is a thorough grasp of the Process Safety Management of Highly Hazardous Chemicals Standard (29 CFR 1910.119). Understanding the requirement isn’t easy; you need experts with field experience in this area to avoid expensive mistakes. Your outside engineering firm will require a variety of information:
• What automation and controls are needed?
• Will you require any “add-ons” like clean-in-place (CIP) or effluent neutralization systems, etc.?
• How do you plan to handle waste byproducts?
• What method of packaging and shipping do you want?
• Where will you get seasoned operators to run the pilot plant?
The earlier you can start planning for these operational considerations, the more accurate your design will be.
Tackling Design And Costs
Even though you’re building a physical pilot plant, the process steps begin with modeling. Modeling software is the perfect zero-to-infinity knob for rapidly dialing into target specifications. Process modeling of your desired product inputs and outputs quickly will determine if scaling to the selected size is feasible — and doable at a reasonable expense.
After determining the optimal mass and energy balances via simulation, selecting equipment is the next major step. Think one move ahead. Strategize on the next-size pilot plant and the data necessary to create a confident design for that scale. The goal is to use large enough equipment for key processing steps to get valid data without over-engineering which results in high costs. Follow a 10:1 rule when sizing your system. If you’re making 1,000 gal/d, you should aim to select equipment that allows for 10,000 gallons. Going beyond that scale doesn’t give you reliable data on heat transfer and reaction kinetics.
Once you have a working design and model, the next step is to value-engineer your pilot unit to address factors you can control. While you can’t change the corrosive nature of a required chemical, you likely can achieve cost savings by taking steps in other areas, e.g.:
- Re-evaluate output requirements
- Cut non-critical instrumentation and sampling points
- Reduce access points
- Exclude known processes
- Take advantage of modular construction
- Re-examine materials of construction (MOC) requirements
Good Design
In addition, logistics is important to project success. You must optimize constructability and equipment installation sequencing to minimize interference for later equipment and instrumentation additions. Two-dimension and three-dimension skid models can identify how equipment is layered and simulate additions to the skid to form a sequence plan.
Lowering Operating Costs
Pilot plant costs don’t end when the system is installed at your facility. Changes to the utilities and raw materials required for operation and daily pilot plant procedures can significantly influence overall expenditures. Even though a pilot plant often is a temporary installation, it still can markedly affect your overall manufacturing site. To optimize your operational expenses, consider the following:
- Design with installation and operation in mind
- Select an appropriate site
- Resist the automation temptation
- Manually add ingredients
- Rethink packaging
When considering ways to lower operating costs, avoid sacrificing the robustness of your overall system. People tend to be less consistent than automated equipment and potentially could introduce a new source of process upsets, increased transient states, or required startups and shutdowns.
The last major area to consider is project management. Poor project management rather than a design flaw often causes a project’s failure. From scheduling mishaps to sub-contractor miscommunication, many steps can go wrong once your pilot plant leaves the design desk.There’s a considerable advantage to having an outside pilot plant design/ build expert manage your project from concept to completion. Risk management plans, scheduling tools, and equipment specifications are a few examples of highly refined tools your design/build partner will feature.
Look for a partner with knowledge of both plant operations and design/build/engineering experience in your size project. The process systems company should have a deep understanding of the fundamental relationships and dependencies that exist between the major phases of projects and the design/build/equipment tradeoffs for your type of project. Find a partner you trust and lean on it to avoid mistakes, prove your process and deliver a successful pilot plant!
Pilot plants: Destined for Development
Pilot plants are on the verge of an unprecedented evolution. Read about the 10 factors that’ll impact the design, construction and operation of these next-generation units.
- Outsourcing
- Automation
- Fugitive emissions
- Multiple trains
- Online analytical capabilities
- Safety and control system interaction
- Wireless technology
- Instrument availability
- Instrument multi-functionality
- Unit size
Outsourcing
Contractors will play an expanding role in supplementing or replacing in-house resources in the conventional design, construction, start-up and operation sequence — prompted by companies’ desires to be more efficient and responsive while minimizing commitments to longer-term in-house resources. This will range from contract design, construction, and maintenance to increasing use of outsourced analytical services, programming, and even operations. The greater flexibility contracted services offer to gear up for a sudden short-term need or scale back during an industry downturn will prove irresistible to many organizations. However, those firms apt to be the most successful will maintain some in-house expertise — at a reduced level overall but concentrated in more depth and considered more of a strategic resource. Companies will continue to value in-house design skills but will be more willing to bet that an outside firm can design a pilot-plant vessel right or built it just the way they want. The most successful will recognize the need to maintain some fairly high level of expertise to find, evaluate, review and select the best contractor — and probably to do some or all of the unit process design — as well as to make use of the resultant pilot plant and its data.
Automation
Manual operation has already almost completely given way for the operation of all but the simplest pilot plants. Automation currently is moving along the path of reducing operating staff attendance from essentially full-time down to progressively less-and-less part-time. The next generation of units will require even lower operator presence and make much greater use of recipe-driven menus that allow the operator to select the sequence of the operations from a master list and then depart, secure in the knowledge that the pilot plant will properly execute each step (well, at least most of the time). Different pilot plants will employ the same sequences, as organizations strive to develop a more standardized approach to common operations like charging, pretreatment and sampling. Efforts to develop the “best” approach will make these operating sequences more uniform and sharable. Examples include more complex charging, filling and preparation arrangements, automated sampling protocols, and even operational sequences like planned experimentation based on the latest test results.
Fugitive emissions
Increased toxicity of materials, reduced exposure limits and growing concerns for the long-term health effects of any exposure will push efforts to design and construct units that are leak-free under all circumstances. Decreasing operator attendance, which reduces the time available for identifying and locating leaks, also will promote this trend. The combined health and operational concerns will spur companies to install more equipment that is less leak-prone. Sealless pumps and mixers, bellows-seal valves, and high-integrity fittings typify the leak-free components rapidly becoming common on pilot plants. Automatic tube welders, which make welding easier and a more viable alternative to conventional joining methods, will proliferate, while specialty closures and assemblies will increasingly replace conventional flanges and piping. More and more instrumentation will come as sealed units or with higher-integrity seals. Routine automatic online leak detection, currently rare and intermittent, will become more popular to address the reduced operator presence and ensure safety when no one is around.
Multiple trains
The reduced staffing that automation makes possible, coupled with the enormous expansion in data work-up and mining capabilities offered by today’s computers will promote the increased use of multiple trains. This will increase the complexity of pilot plants as well as their support and maintenance requirements — but the added productivity and effectiveness will outweigh the higher costs. Such setups may consist of multiple trains on the same unit or multiple copies of a single unit, depending upon the organization’s requirements. They will provide not only traditional data but also more in-depth analytical and operational results for use in evaluation and design.
Online analytical capabilities
Over the last 20 years, the number of online analytical tools has dramatically grown. This trend will accelerate as analytical data become more integrated into process operation and not just data analysis. Process control based on real-time analytical data, already increasingly popular, will widely spread. Process optimization, only just beginning to grow in pilot plants, will proliferate. More importantly, integrating these data into the pilot plant’s control system will become more uniform and hence easier and less expensive. Third-party programs, integrated systems, and common bus structures will allow the data to be fed to the process control system in a more straightforward, less proprietary. manner. The complexity of the pilot-plant control system will grow as these inputs are integrated to the maximum feasible extent. More difficult analyses such as particle-size distribution and complex product compositions will gain a greater role.
Safety and control system interaction
The age-old separation of control and safety systems has largely blurred into being almost unrecognizable on many pilot plants. Growing concern over how well the safety system will respond should the control system be unavailable or non-functional will force pilot-plant control systems in new directions. In some cases, a simplified layer-of-protection analysis will lead to an overall safe design. In others, the prevalence of separate microprocessors in a single control system will allow operation safely in both modes, given proper initial configuration. Continued use of separate control and safety systems will remain common for the foreseeable future, but they both will be microprocessor-based, smaller, cheaper, and more failsafe, as well as easier to integrate and program. Integrated systems that have separate microprocessors on each board or rack will become more common and provide the redundancy a safety system requires.
Wireless technology
We have only begun to scratch the surface of using wireless technology for pilot-plant operations. While the long distances between sensors and control, which are driving this technology in plants, usually do not exist in pilot plants, its lower cost, greater flexibility, and reduced construction time make the technology too attractive to ignore for much longer. As wireless devices become cheaper and more common, thanks to their use in plants, they will gain greater acceptance for pilot plants. As time goes on, they will replace the usual hardwired systems from small tank farms and remote operations. We will see greater use of wireless highways not just to gather data but also to transmit data to end-users and storage.
Instrument availability
Small-scale magnetic flow meters, vortex meters, corrosion probes, and numerous other devices were but a dream for most pilot-plant designers 20 years ago. Now many are becoming increasingly common and low cost. The growth in this area will continue. The availability of these devices will allow pilot-plant designers to solve some issues that have plagued them for years (much as the advent of thermal mass flow meters in the 1970s finally put to rest the search for an ultrasmall-size control valve to use with differential pressure devices). The resultant boost in accuracy and reliability will, in turn, enable pilot plants to produce valid useful data with every run — obviating statistical analysis of several runs to address inaccuracy and non-repeatability.
Instrument multi-functionality
Multi-functional units will proliferate. Pressure transmitters will simultaneously measure temperatures; flow meters also will provide pressure or density in a single unit. Calibration of most new transmitters will occur while the unit is in place and online. While the individual transmitter will be more expensive, it will be smaller, more accurate, and more reliable. The decrease in installation costs will more than offset the higher purchase price. These multi-functional units also will interface more easily with control and data-acquisition systems, generating additional savings in programming and setup.
Unit size
The days of the size of pilot plants shrinking every generation are probably approaching a realistic end. However, the use of very small high-throughput “pilot plants” (which actually are more akin to very complex experimental equipment) will increase. These high-throughput units will handle much of the screening currently performed more slowly and expensively in standard small pilot plants. Highly automated pilot plants then will run the promising leads at a more realistic and scalable range, to evaluate synergistic effects and operations at transient conditions as well as process conditions more realistic of a plant environment. The combination, when properly applied , will produce a greater number of high-quality leads faster, and provide a means to screen these for the next generation of process or product improvements. Modeling will continue to augment and validate pilot-plant operations and, in the always symbiotic relationship, pilot plants will continue to augment and validate modeling.
Cost impact
The combination of all of the trends described will translate into an increased cost to design, construct, start-up and operate next-generation pilot plants. It also will raise the expense and effort to keep these pilot plants effectively running. The days of maintenance support being a few craftspeople on loan from the plant or hired when needed through a local contractor are over — although many maintenance functions will be routinely outsourced for cost or to gain access to specialists. Just as the “tooth to tail” ratio in the modern military keeps getting smaller as the lethality of weaponry and their associated complexity increase, so the “unit to support” costs of pilot plants will shrink; the data will become better, more useful, and more focused — but keeping units working properly will incur higher costs and effort. The traditional process and mechanical engineering support requirements will continue, matched now by computing, automation, safety, and electronics support requirements.
Will all these predictions come to pass? Probably not, although I think most will, in some form or another. Beyond these, I forecast that an even-more-novel trend, not mentioned nor even imagined by most pilot-plant personnel, will arise and significantly change the way we all design, construct and operate our pilot plants. After all, that’s what research is all about, change, both planned and predicted, as well as new and unexpected! These predictions, of course, represent my personal view.
Thank-you so much for reading!