Process Development

Performing a Pilot Plant Trial prior to scale up or purchasing equipment offers the following benefits:

Lab Trials are performed using borosilicate glass equipment, while production equipment uses 316 stainless steel.  Pope’s pilot plant equipment is 316 Stainless Steel and scaling to larger equipment is linear and predictable.  Stainless Steel equipment provides greatly increased heat transfer to the product. This allows for faster feed rates, and for reduced risk of product degradation.

Continuous feed and discharge of material through the use of pumps allows the process conditions to be optimized through feed rate studies and analysis of products in real-time.  The results obtained allow for confident scaling of processes.

Pope can explore the material handling restrictions of the material being tested. Process pumps and instrumentation can be selected and tested for long-term continuous operation. The information gathered from the material handling aspect of the pilot plant provides valuable information for either scaled-up toll processing/contract distillation or for the quotation of equipment to the customer.

Large samples of material are able to be generated in a relatively short period.

Performing a Pilot Plant Trial can reveal concerns that are not evident in a shorter lab trial.  The longer running time can show concerns that need to be alleviated through engineering and save costly downtime once the process moves to full production scale.

The Pope Scientific pilot processing area is also home to our 6” stainless steel hybrid wiped film distillation unit. This unit is used to perform Pilot Trials and feasibility studies for materials that require some fractionation.

The scale-up of a chemical process can be a long and difficult road, but with the help of Pope’s highly skilled operators, chemists, and engineers, we have the tools necessary to simplify and speed up the process.