Scaling Up Operations in The Chemical Industry 2023

The new year after the COVID pandemic may turn out to be very interesting given the scale-up in operations and methodologies in the chemical and biotechnology industries. The main reason is that during the pandemic, companies, their people, and engineers worked from home. They were required to answer questions even though they were not in front of laboratory equipment; to be very precise, they really needed to come to the laboratory, which was constrained by time and occupancy numbers. Hence, every experiment became very important and crucial for the industry.
Based on what has happened as we return to normality in 2023, we find the advantage to understand that every experiment should be intensively won. In other words, one experiment should provide all the information possible to characterize our next step in the pilot, production, or design, and give us the capability to understand more deeply about the scale-up operation and science. The requirements will be to incorporate into experiments the interactions between materials, understand the environment we’re generating in order to generate good results in the reaction (e.g., crystallization, fermentation, and formulation), and to integrate and then disseminate this operational knowledge through the company and its branches. In order to transfer this knowledge successfully, it is required to have more simulations.

Thus, scale-up operations in the chemical industry in 2023 will become completely different, requiring the normal chemical process engineer that is involved in these activities to have a better understanding about the interaction between the mixing, the flow, the meaning of these, and the conditions we’re providing to the process, e.g., fermentation, formulation, the polymorph, crystallization, etc. This is a new skill situation, demands from the normal chemical process engineer tools that are providing mixing characterization and the connection to the process. I hope that we will be able to support you in this endeavor—as we have over many years—by providing a complete understanding and integration between the mechanism of every process, its equipment, and its flow environment.

VisiMix Video

The Influence of Mixing in the Process
New methodology using VisiMix software for the purpose of checking the influence of mixing in the processes.

VisiMix Demo Operation
Learning how to input data into the VisiMix software and get results the will help us understand the influence of mixing in our processes.

Lab Experiments
Learning how to set up the relevant experiments at the lab scale, to develop the processes from an engineering point of view.