(115d) Mini- and Micro-Scale Units in Process Development

Overall societal and industry trends of accepting less risk and desiring a higher degree of safety assurance, has impacted R&D experimental practices.     One approach to reducing risk while maintaining an ability to experiment (and learn) quickly, is to reduce the scale of experiments.  Smaller scale experiments entail lower total energy and/or chemical hazards, by definition, than those conducted at a larger scale.   Relevance to commercial scale-up requires more attention however to underlying fundamental phenomenon, in the absence of which the technical scale-up risk increases. 

Approaches to scale-down of fixed-bed reactors, ion exchange and adsorption systems, crystallization, distillation, and other unit operations, will be examined via a number of case studies.   Included are examples of semi-integration of the micro-scale units to comprise a pilot demonstration of concept.   Use of multi-throughput or “side-by-side” experiments to overcome experimental error and offsets (including batch to continuous translations), will be demonstrated through examples.