Transferring Science to Industrial Application: Challenges in Running Commercial Trials

Taking science to the commercial scale isn't easy. Many new technologies fail because of inabilities to run on a commercial scale. Often the laboratory processing conditions are not easily replicated on production scale equipment. In moving from laboratory scale to production, it is effective to have at least one, if not several intermediate scale-up steps (e.g. scaled batch or a pilot trial) along this development pathway. The concept of scale-up is to take results produced in a small-scale operation and use them to predict results on a larger scale operation and equipment. These results can then be used to modify the technology or operating conditions in order to better replicate the results from the laboratory scale studies onto a commercial trial. Laboratory trials can be quite dependent on the operator, but generally they have fewer variables than in large scale production. Pilot scale trials are less dependent on the operator(s) and provide consistent results, but at the same time the ability to manipulate variables during the process is often more limited on a larger scale. The aim of the present work is to present some of the challenges in transferring a laboratory scale development to commercial machine trials.