What Will Tomorrow’s Chemical Plant Look Like?

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“The consortium creates a critical mass and pools the process expertise of the chemical industry and the academic sector,” explained Buchholz. His enthusiasm is tempered with pragmatism, despite the fact that what he and his colleagues are planning to do is nothing less than a minor revolution. The team is reluctant to reveal the process engineering details behind the concept.

Increasing the level of integration

“We are thinking in terms of Process Equipment Assemblies,” said Dr. Tobias Grömping who is in charge of the F³ Project at BTS. This abstract term is part of the wording which consortium members use to enhance clarity. It refers to individual solutions for individual process steps such as mixers and reactors for synthesis operations and separation equipment for downstreaming.

The Process Equipment Assemblies are assembled step-by-step to create highly-integrated container modules. A complete plug & play reactor module consisting of a controller, power supply and media source is flange-mounted to a backbone. That may sound a bit like Lego and Playmobil, and that is actually the intention. However some producers currently use Playmobil while others prefer Lego. As any child knows, the two don’t really mix very well. The developers hope to merge the two worlds using a backbone architecture and put together a pool of modules which can be combined to create a complete polymer, API or fine chemical plant.

To complete the project on time, the large undertaking has been divided into discrete packages, and the work is being conducted in parallel. The consortium members are currently assessing the product type and production scenarios, and they are also designing and building the backbone. Preliminary process engineering work and development of case studies have also gotten underway.

Even if the revolution fails to take place at the end of the four years, the project will certainly be a turning point, as the industry appears to be serious about introducing radical change. The numbers and names at the kick-off meeting in June last year leave little room for doubt about that. The list of organizations which are on board includes Arkema, Astra Zeneca, BASF, Degussa Evonik, Rhodia and Procter & Gamble along with the crème de la crème of the European academic research community. Some of them are competitors, but the consortium has established some ground rules so that everyone can pull in the same direction.

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