Transfer of Critical Technology Learnings and Unknown to the Engineering Design Package

The transfer of innovative technology from process development to process engineering is a critical step in realizing the technology in a chemical plant.  There are many learnings that are typically gained during the process development process that will have significant impacts on the plant design such as equipment design criteria, operability, maintainability, and control.  Additionally, there are some parts of the technology that are not fully known, or perhaps not fully knowable, and are considered as unknowns and technology risks in the design.  The technology transfer has to consider how to deliver to the process engineering and operations groups, the three major categories of technology learnings for the commercialization: the design criteria; the operating criteria; and the process unknowns and risks.

The technology transfer package begins with the identification of the process development deliverables.  These must be broad based and include the requirements from all of the business functions: marketing and sales, technology, engineering, operations, supply chain, and maintenance.  These requirements create the deliverables for the technology development and identify the important design criteria and operating considerations that must be documented.  Laboratory and pilot plant studies will generate the engineering data needed to support the functional design of the equipment, and the operational experiences and observations will provide insight to the manufacturing organization.  Throughout the technology development, unknowns and risks will be identified and mitigation plans developed that are aimed at achieving a successful implementation of the innovative technology. 

The technology transfer documentation includes all three aspects needed for the implementation.  Key components of the process technology, such as the material and energy balance, functional design criteria for the major equipment, process model, safety limitations or boundaries, and preliminary PFDs and P&IDs are described in detail for the process engineers to complete the scale-up of the design.  The design will also need to provide flexibility for operational considerations such as process variations over the life of a catalyst, product quality variations, fouling, equipment reliability, and other observations from laboratory and pilot testing.  These, as well as the technology unknowns and risks, are documented in the definition of the technology for the process and operations engineers to use in the design and operating procedures.

This work process has resulted in many successful new technology implementations.  The challenges are in identifying the correct information needed to fully define the technology, gathering the necessary engineering design data at the appropriate scale to be able to confidently scale-up the process, tracking and documenting the operational issues that are or could become operational problems on the commercial scale plant, and especially in identifying the technology unknowns and risks.  Our presentation will discuss how these challenges were addressed in several technology implementations, including contingency plans, to successfully commercialize innovative technologies.