Pilot plants: destined for development

I have seen many changes in pilot plants over the course of my career, but I predict that we are on the verge of an unprecedented evolution of these units. My crystal ball sees 10 key factors influencing next-generation pilot plants:

• outsourcing;
• automation;
• fugitive emissions;
• multiple trains;
• online analytical capabilities;
• safety and control system interaction;
• wireless technology;
• instrument availability;
• instrument multi-functionality; and
• unit size.

Let’s look  at each of these and what they may spur.

Outsourcing

Contractors will play an expanding role in supplementing or replacing in-house resources in the conventional design, construction, start up and operation sequence — prompted by companies’ desires to be more efficient and responsive while minimizing commitments to longer term in-house resources. This will range from contract design, construction and maintenance to increasing use of outsourced analytical services, programming and even operations. The greater flexibility contracted services offer to gear up for a sudden short-term need or scale back during an industry downturn will prove irresistible to many organizations. However, those firms apt to be the most successful will maintain some in-house expertise — at a reduced level overall but concentrated in more depth and considered more of a strategic resource. Companies will continue to value in-house design skills but will be more willing to bet that an outside firm can design a pilot-plant vessel right or built it just the way they want. The most successful will recognize the need to maintain some fairly high level of expertise to find, evaluate, review and select the best contractor — and probably to do some or all of the unit process design — as well as to make use of the resultant pilot plant and its data.

Automation

Manual operation has already almost completely given way for operation of all but the simplest pilot plants. Automation currently is moving along the path of reducing operating staff attendance from essentially full-time down to progressively less-and-less part-time. The next generation of units will require even lower operator presence and make much greater use of recipe-driven menus that allow the operator to select the operations sequence from a master list and then depart, secure in the knowledge that the pilot plant will properly execute each step (well, at least most of the time). Different pilot plants will employ the same sequences, as organizations strive to develop a more-standardized approach to common operations like charging, pretreatment and sampling. Efforts to develop the “best” approach will make these operating sequences more uniform and sharable. Examples include more-complex charging, filling and preparation arrangements, automated sampling protocols and even operational sequences like planned experimentation based on the latest test results.

Fugitive emissions

Increased toxicity of materials, reduced exposure limits and growing concerns for the long-term health effects of any exposure will push efforts to design and construct units that are leak-free under all circumstances. Decreasing operator attendance, which reduces the time available for identifying and locating leaks, also will promote this trend. The combined health and operational concerns will spur companies to install more equipment that is less leak-prone. Sealless pumps and mixers, bellows-seal valves, and high-integrity fittings typify the leak-free components rapidly becoming common on pilot plants. Automatic tube welders, which make welding easier and a more viable alternative to conventional joining methods, will proliferate, while specialty closures and assemblies will increasingly replace conventional flanges and piping. More and more instrumentation will come as sealed units or with higher-integrity seals. Routine automatic online leak detection, currently rare and intermittent, will become more popular to address the reduced operator presence and ensure safety when no one is around.

Multiple trains

The reduced staffing that automation makes possible, coupled with the enormous expansion in data work-up and mining capabilities offered by today’s computers will promote the increased use of multiple trains. This will increase the complexity of pilot plants as well as their support and maintenance requirements — but the added productivity and effectiveness will outweigh the higher costs. Such setups may consist of multiple trains on the same unit or multiple copies of a single unit, depending upon the organization’s requirements. They will provide not only traditional data but also more-in-depth analytical and operational results for use in evaluation and design.

Online analytical capabilities

Over the last 20 years, the number of online analytical tools has dramatically grown. This trend will accelerate as analytical data become more integrated into process operation and not just data analysis. Process control based on real-time analytical data, already increasingly popular, will widely spread. Process optimization, only just beginning to grow in pilot plants, will proliferate. More importantly, integrating these data into the pilot plant’s control system will become more uniform and hence easier and less expensive. Third-party programs, integrated systems and common bus structures will allow the data to be fed to the process control system in a more-straightforward, less-proprietary manner. The complexity of the pilot-plant control system will grow as these inputs are integrated to the maximum feasible extent. More-difficult analyses such as particle-size distribution and complex product compositions will gain a greater role.