Technology transfer, difficulties

The process itself needs to be defined in detail All the relevant process information must be described and documented. Technology transfer of chemical processes is rather simple compared to biotech processes due to well-understood, robust and predictable chemical reactions. In contrast, technology transfers of bio-processes often cause difficulties due to the lack of process understand-ing/information. These areas, where process knowledge is rather limited, also... 

While some of the above difficulties are inherent to the virtual character of the customer, the latter can take some actions to avoid the technology transfer from hell. Namely ... 

To enable us to better understand some of the difficulties that exist in developing countries, I will review two specific examples, one in Mexico and one in Indonesia. These will highlight a few of the problems that developing countries have in their factories, such as differences in system installations, technology transfer, production methodologies, production objectives, logistics problems, and communications. 

A plasma process that has been demonstrated to yield good quality materials in the laboratory will one day need to be scaled up to a technology that can produce the materials in larger sizes and larger quantities. Such a transfer is not straightforward, and many technological difficulties will have to be overcome before a scaled-up process is commercially viable. 

There are other mysteries in NIR (and other applications of chemometrics) that nonlinearity can also explain. For example, as indicated above, one is the difficulty of transferring calibration models between instruments, even of the same type. Where would our technological world be if a manufacturer of, say, rulers could not reliably transfer the calibration of the unit of length from one ruler to the next ... 

The technology for the manufacture of LA on a pilot plant scale (2.5kg/batch) has been successfully transferred to ordnance factories. Based on HEMRL technology, these factories are manufacturing LA regularly on out-turn basis for the production of various detonators. Several hundred tonnes of LA have been manufactured so far and hundreds of thousands of detonators using LA have been produced and accepted without any difficulty. 

It is obvious from the enormity of the literature on separation sciences that these methods dominate over direct methods and, some would say, with obviously good reasons because interferences are minimized. However it is also fair to point out that, for a great many of these investigations, the samples used to develop the experimental conditions and separation theories are carefully tailored laboratory mixtures that are so elementary in composition that they do not even begin to duplicate the many difficulties that are encountered when the technology is transferred to the analysis of real samples. 

Ethyl acetate, one of the most common presently used solvents for printing food contact materials, could cause many sensory problems with its very low odor threshold of 10 mg/kg. Assuming a complete transfer of ethyl acetate from the packaging into the product, it is calculated that the threshold level in Table 13-6 is reached with a package surface area to product mass of > 1 m2/kg based on a content in the material of 10 mg ethylacetate per m2. This could only be the case for small packages or for foods with a low fill weight (e.g. potato chips). With the present state-of-the-art technology the residual amounts of ethylacetate are usually under 10 mg/m2 and can be monitored analytically without difficulty. 

---