Upscale pilot plant

The scheme of commercial methane synthesis includes a multistage reaction system and recycle of product gas. Adiabatic reactors connected with waste heat boilers are used to remove the heat in the form of high pressure steam. In designing the pilot plants, major emphasis was placed on the design of the catalytic reactor system. Thermodynamic parameters (composition of feed gas, temperature, temperature rise, pressure, etc.) as well as hydrodynamic parameters (bed depth, linear velocity, catalyst pellet size, etc.) are identical to those in a commercial methana-tion plant. This permits direct upscaling of test results to commercial size reactors because radial gradients are not present in an adiabatic shift reactor. 

The only safe way of designing a rotary dryer is based on pilot plant tests or by comparison with known performance of similar operations. Example 9.5 utilizes pilot plant data for upscaling a dryer. The design of Example 9.6 also is based on residence time and terminal conditions of solid and air established in a pilot plant. 

In this chapter, we discussed the concepts of models and prototypes and presented the criteria for scaling a chemical process from a model to a prototype or from a commercial plant to a pilot plant or a laboratory. We also introduced the concepts of upscaling and downscaling in this chapter. 

An unpublished cradle-to-gate life cycle analysis (LCA) study subcontracted to Vito (Mol, Belgium) tried to identify environmental bottlenecks of rhamnolipid and sophorolipid production and compare them with those of market reference surfactants according to the ISO 1404x series. Experimental data for the pilot plant scale were complemented with LCA data from the Vito database as well as literature data for the upscaled production scenario. In order to compare the environmental profile of these biosurfactants with market reference surfactants data were used from Zah and Hischier [18]. The Eco-Indicator 99 methodology [19] was used to determine environmental impacts. 

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