Scale-up risk

Evaluation of economies of scale is part of the detailed process design. The size of equipment and the use of multiple equipment trains is evaluated with respect to product cost, market demands, batch size and scale-up risk. 

The scale-up risk is too large to proceed directly from the mrniplant to the industrial-scale plant... 

You can purify organics lo ppm levels using Sulzer Chem-lech s Fractional Crystallization Process, Without solvents and without ctystal slurries. More than twenty industiial plants are operating round the clock, reliably and efficiently Emission Iree and troublefree. There is no scale up risk with this Process. With one drum o( feed we con run pilot tests to determine capital and operating costs. 

The design approach for Pearl GTL is that essentially limited scale-up risks have been taken at equipment level. As a result the Air Separation Units (ASU s), The Shell Gasification Process reactors (SGP s) and Heavy Paraffin Synthesis reactors (HPS s) are all built in a modular fashion, i.e. with multiple parallel imits. 

Negligible scale-up risk - more passages, not bigger passages. 

Enhanced reaction rates Increased reaction conversion and selectivity Reduced reaction severity Heat integration benefits Novel process configurations possible Reduced capital costs/operating costs Simplified separations Relatively new technology Limited apphcations Complex modelling needs Increased operational complexity Significant development costs Increased scale-up risks Extensive equipment design effort... 

Development of fundamentally based phenomenological models for reactors with two (three) moving phases is possible (e.g., bubble colurrms, riser, stirred tank, etc.). Availability of such models adds value and significantly reduces scale-up risks. It enables rational approach for the improvement of existing processes. 

Another important type of problem that may confront engineers is the scale-up risk. The question may be "What effects will be relatively more pronounced on the larger scale ". This may be, e.g., thermal instability, incomplete micromixing, enhanced agglomeration, etc. But even when the quantitative effects cannot be predicted accurately, a qualitative understanding of the phenomena is valuable. 

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