Lubricants, Fuels, Petrochemicals

The Importance of Pilot Plants in These Industries

Pilot plants play a crucial role in these and related industries, serving as essential intermediate platforms between qualitative R&D lab work and the production environment. These systems allow process development and optimization with reasonably economical quantities of materials to enable the finalization of equipment and process design before installation and implementation at full-scale production levels. 

Process Applications

• Separations of components from very heavy crude oil refinery vacuum bottoms residues for byproduct studies 
• Cutting waxes into fractions with differing melting points for specialty products such as temperature switches. 
• Fractionating lubricants to produce products with specific viscosity ranges. 
• Purification of biobased fuels and intermediate chemicals 
• Devolatilization and solvent recovery for many processes. 

Our Approach

Pope Scientific understands that from lab work, many factors do not pertain or scale up well to production duty equipment such as heat and mass transfer, physical behavior, and power needs. Our state-of-the-art turnkey pilot plant skid modules are designed to ensure that results from this equipment provide meaningful scale-up information that is consistent with and predictable for correct sizing of high investment capital production installations.  For example, our wiped film still pilot plants utilize stainless steel units of a size and design that act very similarly to much larger scale systems and provide data which is linear to evaporator surface area, thus sizing and procuring the production equipment to match throughput requirements is accurate.  This optimizes production, product quality, investment, and profitability.