Pilot Plant Scale Up Safety Evaluation

Scale up incidents follow a pattern our team has seen many times. Chemistry that runs safely at 100 mL in a stirred tank lab reactor can escape thermal control at 100 L pilot scale because the surface area to volume ratio drops by an order of magnitude, mixing time extends, heat removal lags, and an exotherm that was previously buffered now escalates. The T2 Laboratories MCMT runaway of 2007 with four fatalities, the Concept Sciences hydroxylamine event of 1999, the Bayer CropScience event of 2008, and a steady stream of pharma and specialty chemical pilot plant events all trace back to inadequate scale up safety evaluation. Our work brings together calorimetric data from DSC, RC1, ARC, and VSP2 that we translate through Stoessel criticality logic into the operating envelope for your target scale. We add dimensionless heat transfer analysis using Damkohler, Biot, and Nusselt numbers, mixing time and dead zone characterisation through CFD or experimental tracer studies, continuous versus batch decision logic, an engineering controls inventory covering cooling capacity, dosing rate, emergency relief, and kill system effectiveness, and a HAZOP at each scale gate. Where the chemistry is energetic and residence time at kilogram scale is the failure mode driver, we also evaluate continuous flow and microreactor routes as inherently safer alternatives for your facility.