Monday, March 28, 2016

INDUSTRY SPECIAL ......A Look at Future Production Concepts in Chemical Industry

A Look at Future Production Concepts in Chemical Industry


Over the last years, chemical and pharmaceutical industry companies have been working on two major production concepts to further improve their production of chemicals, drugs, materials or biotechnology products: continuous flow and modularized production. The general goal is to produce faster, with a higher quality and less waste.
Due to globalized and volatile markets, reduction of time-to-market is as essential as safe, resource-efficient and flexible production. The chemical industry is facing an increasing demand from fast growing and vibrant markets such as China, India or Brazil (maybe not as strong as expected, but still reasonable) and a trend to customized specialty and fine chemicals. This leads to high product varieties which are produced from small amounts to over hundred tons per year.
But what are the advantages and disadvantages of continuous production processes and modularized production systems? Are these production concepts really helpful for the whole industry, or are they only fit to the production of bulk chemicals?
Let’s have a look at traditional batch processing: Scaling up a batch process is a long-term run and requires a lot of chemical engineering know-how and calculations as well as experimental results from lab-scale and pilot plant prototyping. Step by step the production volume is increased until the final production plant is build. Every step is difficult, accounts for a high investment and increases time-to-market. Not forgetting that market foresight has potentially a high deviation rate as time-to-market is too long.
So, the continuous-flow and modularized process approaches to overcome the disadvantages of the batch process and reduce the development time of a chemical or biotechnological production process from initial idea to market operation with simultaneous energy and resource efficiency are a new paradigm in chemical and pharmaceutical industry. It could also be an example for the agrochemical industry.
Smaller Ecological Footprint
Numerous advantages are offered by continuous production methods: first of all they have a smaller ecological footprint, the required equipment is much smaller and more easy to handle, process cycle times are lower as well as operating costs, maximized quality control and a higher level of automation coupled with less human interaction allows for smarter and digitized process control from upcoming trends like the Internet of Things. You also have to keep in mind that depending on the produced chemical or biotechnological product the usage of single-use equipment could be profitable, and overall the need for inventory and storage is much lower.
For processes which are susceptible to contamination, like in pharmaceutical drug production, continuous processes together with real-time monitoring and regular sampling can easily detect such contaminations and allow for discarding only a small amount of the product instead of the entire batch.
Another key point of continuous-flow production is the fact that the process is fully integrated, meaning the products of one reaction flow into the next through small-volume pipes. So scientists and engineers in specialty and fine chemical companies can now use certain kinds of chemical reactions that are not feasible in batch processes, such as very fast reactions, highly exothermic reactions, safety-relevant conversions like nitrations or those which require specific light- or UV-impulse or high temperatures. This could open a completely new field of chemicals and drugs.
Only a Question of Time
According to fine chemical and pharmaceutical companies, it seems that it is only a question of time until for example all major pharmaceutical drug producers have commercial-scale continuous-manufacturing facilities.
For higher outputs which may be needed in specialty chemical industry, a single micro- or milli-structured reaction system sometimes doesn’t fit. But modularized plant systems, working with continuous manufacturing methods as key enablers, allow a quick reaction to increasing or decreasing market demands and are very suitable for the chemical process industry. The target behind modular plant systems is to use standard modules for continuous manufacturing. Therefore, modules and components must be integrated and multi-scalable to really accelerate modeling and process design.
By using continuous manufacturing laboratory equipment very similar to the final process equipment, the detailed engineering of the final production facility can be already realized with the chosen laboratory plant structure. The production facility is then assembled from pre-configured modules. The wise combination of these components into modules and the associated integrated information modeling from the process design to the initial operation are essential cross-cutting activities. They reduce on the one hand throughput times and on the other hand optimize the energy efficiency of the process.
Separation and Other Hardware Modules are Needed
To realize an efficient modular plant system, the mentioned integrated and multi-scalable reaction, separation and other hardware modules are needed. Only with these modules and components the transfer of laboratory reactions directly into mass production would be possible, circumventing pilot projects and time-consuming adjustments of the chemical recipe. The development of scalable components supports the concurrent development of appropriate planning and hardware modules for recurring process steps and frequently used components (such as pumps, columns, reactors, infrastructure, etc.). These modules must be integrated into a planning tool that supports the entire design process from early process development in the laboratory up to the 3-D plant model.
The modularization of key components such as columns and pumps as well as the data integration and data management through various phases in the plant design cycle contributes significantly to an increased efficiency and reduced time-to-market as well as allows for industry-wide use.
Furthermore, models of automotive industry supply chains can be adapted, which offer great potential for synergies and competitive advantages for specialty and fine chemicals companies. So, the continuous-manufacturing and modularized plant system approach could lead to produce cost-effectively over the long term and this right from day one, just by offering the optimal balance between investments and operating costs as well as future updates — the future standard in chemical process industry?

http://www.process-worldwide.com/a-look-at-future-production-concepts-in-chemical-industry-a-523763/index2.html

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