- March 13, 2025
- Post link
There’s an old saying “the bigger, the better” but is this really true?
It doesn’t apply on the field of microelectronics, nanotechnology and even personal devices, who still reminisces about walking around with a mobile phone the size of a house brick?, but what about in areas where the goal is often to get really big, really quickly, such as manufacturing in the food, feed, materials and chemicals sectors?
There’s a stage in all product commercialization, be it in a VC backed startup or a blue-chip multinational, where the question is asked “will it scale?”, both from a commercial and technology standpoint. The response to address the technology question is often to find the biggest tanks, fermenters and downstream processing equipment available and ask the owner for a quotation to run the process. After the price of a scale-up run has been established, and everyone has got back onto the chairs they fell off when they heard the number, it turns out:
- The budget only allows for 2 or 3 runs maximum
- The yield looks low because of the large dead volumes in single batches run on large equipment
- Any product is too expensive and will still be sold at breakeven, or worse
- If something goes wrong, it’s pay again to have another go
- After everything, the “will it scale?” question remains only partially answered
At this stage, the dripping tap of project costs can quickly turn into a torrent, for a multinational this results in candid conversations, for a startup this can be terminal. However, to extend the analogy further, when a tap is dripping at home, it can be surprising just how much water accumulates over a night, day, week, month…. Ultimately the amount of water will be the same as turning the tap on full for a few minutes. This can also apply to process scale up.
With improvements in modelling, once tanks and fermenters are >1000L in volume and process flows are >100 L or kg / hour, the performance of equipment and unit operations at scale is reasonably predictable. A downstream process using small but industrially relevant equipment can be established, and the final product will be representative of that manufactured in the future commercial plant. There are several other advantages of the “smaller for longer” approach:
- It proves out the true operational reality of running the full process over time
- Equipment performance can be tuned or unit operations entirely swapped out more easily
- Loops can be closed (e.g. re-use of condensate), accumulation of interfering substances can be seen (e.g. in crystallization)
- A more complete set of engineering data can be obtained to support the Conceptual and Basic Design of the full facility.
- Product for sale or testing with customers is produced with reliable regularity, quantity and quality.
It might seem that the inevitable conclusion is to build more pilot plants. It’s not, at least not in the conventional way! Too much has already been spent on dedicated facilities that now stand empty due to lack of funds, knowledge or support to make them useful. Rather a paradigm shift is required from all parties; from senior executives and investors feeling comfortable to ask more sophisticated questions (more on this in another article), to national funding agencies reevaluating the support they wish to provide and technology owners and developers not trying to shortcut the system, well not too much anyway.
Paradigm shifts don’t have to be difficult, especially where many of the required pieces are already in place.
A Contract Piloting Hub can deliver the “smaller for longer” model. Sites with existing manufacturing space, utilities and mechanical / electrical site services must be coupled with process knowledge and experience to provide support to technology developers before, during and after the manufacturing period. Co-locating several smaller manufacturing units makes the provision of site services more efficient, e.g. a communal night shift monitoring several processes. To manage overheads, engineering design services and construction can be provided by contractors, as needed.
Technology developers and owners, enabled by funding agencies with dedicated mechanisms to support these activities, must be able to commit staff and finances. Ultimately, senior stakeholders and investors will need to accept and understand the virtues of having a temporary asset that serves its purpose of truly proving out a process in a manufacturing environment. This will expedite and de-risk the delivery of industrial scale manufacturing.
The ambition is for the sound of many simultaneously dripping taps to become a beating drum for the “smaller for longer” approach to scale up. This will give the greatest chance for, much needed, new, deep-tech biological and chemical processes to succeed.
