Plant of the future

As chemical production continues to accelerate, it seems obvious that the chemical plant of the future will be even larger than the monsters being built today. Wrong! Many in the chemical industry now believe that smaller, modular facilities are the key to lean, efficient production in the future.

And even the chemical giants - companies that continue to build world-scale plants - are beginning to embrace these changes.

The dilemma is that "if you do not build a plant until there is strong demand for a product, you are already too late," said Dr Stefan Deibel, BASF AG's head of corporate engineering. "If you build a plant at the same time as the competition, excess capacity will cause prices to collapse."

BASF is currently developing strategies to resolve these issues. These include its Modular Plant Concept (MPC) — a technique to analyse whether a stepwise expansion of the installed plant capacity, rather than installing the full capacity at once, is feasible.

"If the economic analysis indicates a step-by-step installation of the plant's capacity is a viable and attractive alternative, the investment cost - calculated as net present value - is reduced and the risk of under-utilisation is minimised," said Deibel.

Some of these new strategies are crystallised in IMPULSE (Integrated Multiscale Process Units with Locally Structured Elements) — a European Union-backed project under its sixth Framework Programme (FP6) (see panel page 16).

The IMPULSE project brings together 11 research institutes from across Europe, and seven industrial partners - including three from different chemistry-based supply chains: Glaxo SmithKline, for pharmaceuticals; Degussa, in speciality chemicals; and Procter & Gamble, for consumer products. Other partners include Siemens (process design and control), Solvent Innovation (for solvent expertise), Britest (process innovation) and Arttic (project management).

IMPULSE aims to encourage the EU process industry to exploit new technologies based on microtechnology - such as micro-reactors, compact heat exchangers and thin film devices - to improve yields, increase efficiency and reduce the effects on the environment.

The initiative "may well revolutionise the chemical and process industry," according to Dr Marcel Liauw, an IMPULSE project leader, based at the Institute for Technology and Micromolecular Chemistry at Aachen University in Germany.

"The goal is to give strategic advantage to European industry on developing the plant of the future," said Liauw.

UK-based Britest's role in IMPULSE is to champion process development strategies that move away from the current approach of assuming the type of equipment to be employed - the batch stirred tank - and then modifying process conditions to enable the chemistry to be carried out in this equipment.

Chemists and chemical engineers "are comfortable with scaling up processes using batch equipment, and thus this approach is perceived, perhaps falsely, to be a low risk strategy," said Dr Jeremy Double, Britest technology translator and project manager for IMPULSE.

Process technologists, he believes, are also discouraged by a lack of information about the fundamental capabilities of novel equipment and do not consider the full range of options for generating better processes.

A more logical approach "is to consider the physico-chemical characteristics of the process — reaction stoichiometry, thermodynamics and kinetics, mass- and heat-transfer requirements, mixing needs — and from these devise process conditions that will deliver the 'best' process," said Double. Engineers can then design or select the most appropriate equipment for the process, he added.

IMPULSE is also trialling new ways of making chemicals. One approach, which has already been studied quite widely across industry, is process intensification. Put very simply, it attempts to get better results, but by using less solvent, less energy and with lower investment - but it is still very much in its infancy.

According to Michael Matlosz, IMPULSE project director and professor of chemical engineering at Ensic-Nancy in France: "Highly intensified process equipment and devices are still confined to niche areas and have not achieved their true potential in the process industries.

Future collaborative research "must focus on overcoming barriers to widespread implementation of process intensification," added Matlosz.

Degussa, an IMPULSE partner and the world's largest producer of speciality chemicals, is already putting it into practice. According to Henrik Hahn, process intensification project house manager at Degussa, the approach might improve yields by "several orders of magnitude", thanks to highly active catalysts, or micro-reactors, that provide "more intensive exchange of heat and material" than conventional equipment.

Dr. Thomas Bayer, head of R&D Projects, Siemens Automation and Drives (A&D), Solutions Process Industries, is co-ordinating Siemens' activities in IMPULSE.

According to Bayer, Siemens is dealing with process engineering, sensors and control on the project. This work, he said, is focused on the changes to the application of control required by the multi-scale approaches being pioneered by the project.

"For reduced dimensions, as in micro- reactors, a faster response of the control system could be necessary. With the smaller scale of the process devices, a smaller scale of sensors becomes important. Therefore, the integration of measurement and possibly control elements into multi-scale devices is an opportunity," said Bayer.

"This could in turn promote the opportunity for "plug and play" technology, where processing devices carry sufficient control capability to enable them to deliver their processing with only co-ordinating control from a central computer," he added.

Among the achievements in the first year of the IMPULSE project, Bayer cited how Siemens has developed a microstructured Coriolis sensor for flow measurement. A first prototype is already available, the Siemens expert said.

Siemens is now targeting improved technologies for testing sensors in multi-scale chemical plants and understanding of the control needs under real conditions in these plants. Bayer also highlighted Siemens' own development of SIPROCESS — a modular, automated micro-process system for chemical syntheses. This, he said, offers an integration of sensors and controls into devices that are suitable for micro-chemical processing.

In addition to integrating a new generation of components into existing systems, IMPULSE has a number of other goals. These include: developing processes that are modular and scalable; reducing or eliminating solvents; and switching from batch to continuous processes.

Project partner Solvent Innovation is working on two of these aims. The company is looking to improve production of its ionic liquids - organic salts with low melting points that can replace solvents - by switching from a batch to a continuous process.

Marc Uerdingen, head of R&D at the company, says that ionic liquids are becoming used more widely in industry, which is likely to lead to higher demand - and increased production. The current batchwise alkylation reaction has a long reaction time, which is not effective for large-scale production.

"We have investigated the potential of continuous operation using microstructured reactors," says Uerdingen. "The ultimate goal is a superior process performance to achieve improved product quality."

Ionic liquids should ideally be clear and colourless, but temperature 'hotspots' - caused by the exothermic reaction - can cause discoloration. Uerdingen believes that a continuous process with rigorous temperature control is the direction in which companies should be moving.

His company's research has developed a prototype integrated micro-reactor that allows a temperature-controlled reaction up to a total flow rate of 0.4litres/hour. An increase of throughput to production scale is possible by adding a reactor plate, it said.

Liauw's team of researchers at Aachen University has, meanwhile, developed a system to monitor and control the reaction, using fibre optics to track both heat flow and the formation of the ionic liquid.



Business solutions

There is, however, still a long way to go before any of these ideas may turn into reality - but the IMPULSE project director is clear on the direction it must take.

"Development must move from individual devices to complete integrated production systems," said Matlosz.

Meanwhile any plant-of-the-future concept must be closely intertwined with the "business of the future," noted Paul Orzeske, vice president and general manager of Honeywell Europe — citing the growing importance of the role of automation companies such as Honeywell in manufacturers' corporate strategies.

"People are coming to us wanting business-oriented solutions rather than just a control solution," he explained.

Deibel at BASF, likewise, believes that manufacturing information systems, advanced process control and process flow logistic will make a major competitive difference in future.

Last word to Matlosz, however, who predicts that much more chemical production will be distributed across several plants, rather than being concentrated in one enormous facility.

"Smaller plants can be situated nearer to customers, slashing transport costs and allowing producers to react quickly to changing market conditions," the IMPULSE leader concluded.

IMPULSE is funded under the European Union's FP6's thematic priority NMP - 'Nanotechnologies, materials and processes' - to the tune of Euro17 million over four years. The EU's share of this is Euro10.5 million.



While IMPULSE can be seen as an attempt to develop new technology, its ultimate aim is to improve the competitiveness of Europe's chemicals industry. According to the project organisers, one of its overall aims is to "maintain European leadership in a high value-added industry sector".

It is organized under three industry sectors - pharmaceuticals, speciality chemicals and consumer chemicals. Each of these will focus on three important types of reaction.

In pharmaceuticals, it is hydrogenation, solids handling and integration of primary and secondary manufacture. For speciality chemicals, the challenges are in liquid-liquid alkylation, mini-emulsion polymerisation and electrochemical alkoxylation. Within consumer products, the project will focus on sulphonation and sulphation, encapsulation and emulsification.

Although not involved in the project, Ciba Specialty Chemicals began to produce its Irgafos process stabliser in a continuous process at its Lampertheim plant in Germany. This allowed it to double production to 10,000 tonnes/year, while simultaneously reducing energy consumption and raw material usage.

IMPULSE is not alone in addressing these types of concern. In Japan, a similar research effort is called the MCPT project (Micro Chemical Process Technology). Its aim is to "implement experimental research on high-efficiency micro-chemical process technology" and to "contribute to the establishment of high-efficiency chemical plants".

According to MCPT's chairman, Takashi Takeuchi: "Not only the chemical industry, but related fields such as the medical, pharmaceutical and biotechnological industries have placed high expectations on micro-chemical process technology to transform the conventional methods of industrial production."