(116f) Methodology for SMART Chemical Process Development: Synergy of Statistics, Simulation and Science (S3)

As fierce competition, rising raw material cost and increasing regulations are reducing profitability lower and lower, value of innovation, lower cost, and faster time to market i.e. being right at first time has never been as important as today. Large expenditure during process deployment or optimization phase can be avoided my anticipating and addressing various issues proactively in development phase. Major process improvement or troubleshooting solutions typically require design related changes. Extensive trial and error experimentation to develop process solutions is no more intelligent choice. Future challenges demand shift from traditional process development to SMART Process Development. There is a traditional approach which highly emphasizes on empiricism, trial and error. This approach is suitable for very complex system and may lead to faster time to market, but causes significant setback when major process troubleshooting or innovation is required. On the other hand, approach solely based on fundamentals of engineering and science, builds processes knowledge for innovation and problem solving but rather requires longer development time and is generally associated with surprises during scale up and deployment. Optimum blend of these two approaches with other tools leads to synergy. Proposed methodology merges tools from different areas, with Principles of Chemical Engineering and lay down framework for SMART Process Development.

This paper presents systematic approach for chemical process development to ensure that robust chemical processes are developed and deployed. One of the primary focuses is to execute fewer but efficient high value experiments. It also emphasizes for addressing process deployment and optimization challenges proactively, since cost of dealing with such issues, is an order of magnitude less in development phase than in the later phases of project.