Creating efficient lab workflows with smarter reactors and pilot plants
Oftentimes it is a misconception that the reactor or other equipment in the lab is the most expensive cost center for R&D or process development. In fact, if you do the right analysis, and account for all indirect costs, it is the people in the R&D that are the most expensive and important asset. This makes it imperative to create efficient lab workflows that will make the best resources of people you have.
As the chemicals industry becomes more competitive R&D teams are under immense pressure to execute more projects with the same set of people. Although budgets may increase, good lab technicians and scientists are scarce resources and may not be easily available even for companies willing to hire. All this makes it important to brainstorm how to select equipment for new projects that can let your teams use their time more efficiently.
In this blog post, we present some tips and ideas to think about when buying your next reactor (or similar lab equipment) that will help you create a better lab environment. Please contact our process experts at Amar for a more detailed discussion since every lab scenario is unique! [email protected]
- Often (not always; exceptions apply!) it is a wasteful practice to have lab technicians manually take readings from pilot plants. This may seem obvious, yet even today when we visit university or industrial labs the ubiquitous picture is a technician (or even a Ph.D. scientist!) with a stopwatch around his neck, noting down Temperature and Pressure and similar numbers. This sort of measurement can easily be automated and there are better uses for the technician's time. Various systems based on PLCs, DCS, microcontrollers, or other proprietary hardware can easily log such data.
- If you use a human to log data he can only do it so often: once every 15 to 20 minutes is typical. In an automated data acquisition system, for the same price, it does not matter if you capture data once every 20 minutes or 20 times a minute. This gives a far more granular dataset. Agreed that quantity of data is not everything but you always have the option to filter unwanted data or coarse-grain your time series later. If you want to err, I would rather err on the side of too much data than too little data. Most of our Amar pressurized reactors as well as pilot plants can be configured to automate data acquisition. Please talk to our application experts for more details! [email protected]
- A past situation we encountered was a temperature spike which was short-lived but damaged the product quality. When the reactor was manually monitored the operators mostly missed this spike till they were lucky enough to have a reading taken during the short interval the temperature had spiked. Had there been an automated logging system this exothermic event would have been easily captured. Data acquisition automation can thus have safety and quality implications and not just efficiency.
- Penny wise pound foolish: Often there is a tendency to go for a manual reactor since the corresponding automated model may cost a little extra. This is a false economy. If you factor in the human time saved the higher cost of automation easily justifies itself. Please remember to ask us at Amar (or your vendor!) what the extra cost of automation would be and you may be surprised at how economical it can often be!
- Open data acquisition standards: Make sure your vendor allows exporting data to CSV or Excel or a recognized open format. Although lab data sharing protocols are still evolving, workflows will often require exporting data to other software like Matlab or R or Comsol or Fluent and hence it is crucial to not get trapped by a proprietary data export format that is vendor-specific.
- Pilot Plant Retrofits are great opportunities to get smarter reactors: Often older pilot plant systems and reactors were designed to be fully manual due to the high legacy costs of automation. We have had various successful projects where our customers decided to revamp an old system and simultaneously upgrade data acquisition capabilities to make it smarter. Please be on the lookout for such opportunities in your lab! It is indeed possible to teach an old reactor new tricks! Make sure you identify a vendor who is willing to work with you on such customization projects rather than push a new system that you may not always be able to afford.
Please contact our internal experts at Amar to discuss more such opportunities to create smarter lab reactors and hence efficient workflows. [email protected]