Batch plant management

This control activity is primarily concerned with determining what products will be made in the batch plant and when those products will be made. This requires the control activity to interface with the process management, recipe management, and information management control activities. 

Bonfill, A., Bagajewicz, M., Espuna, A. and Puigjaner, L. (2004) Risk management in the scheduling of batch plants under uncertain market demand. Industrial and Engineering Chemistry Research, 43, 741-750. 

A lot of contradictions in planning processes have their root in the separation of material requirements planning and resource scheduling. This leads to the situation that detailed planning of multipurpose batch plants is still the domain of experienced production schedulers and shift managers who have gained superior knowledge over the years that makes them indispensable. 

Batching cement manually and poor management of cement stocks can result in large losses. Modem batch plant computers have provision for entering the amounts of all received materials and producing a report of all... 

As aforementioned, the market demand for products manufactured through batch processes is usually variable. At the stage of conceptual design of a batch plant, it is almost impossible to obtain precise information on the future product demand over the lifetime of the plant. However, decisions must be made on the plant capacity. For this reason, design is generally performed with product portfolio and production scheme that are representative of the future product list, but it must be highlighted that the operated plant will probably have to be managed with other product candidates. The capacity of the plant should be able... 

Brief Description of Incident This facility manufactured powder coatings and paint additives by a process using free-radical polymerization of acrylic monomers in flammable solvents. A customer requested more of an additive than the facility would normally make in a single batch, so managers decided to scale up the operation to produce the required amount for the order. The managers and most operators in this plant had been with the plant less than a year, and none of them had previous experience in manufacturing polymers. 

Managing Financial Risk in Scheduling of Batch Plants... 

Batch plants are more flexible than continuous plants and so process conditions and sequences can more easily be altered both by design and error A systematic record of process conditions for each batch is essential so that drey can be related to quality analysis results. Such changes in process conditions are formally agreed with the process chemist, and authorized only after a thorough safeiy/hazard check by the commissioning manager. 

It particularly deals with the contribution to these aspects made by continuous rather than a batch plant. It is suggested that the advantages of modern, continuous process plant may stem from automation, particularly with computer or microprocessor control. The ability to simulate plant operation or to modify before commissioning enables plant managers and even plant operators to contribute to a successful new process. 

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