Scale down approach

Piloting plays a key role in closing the critical gap between scientific feasibility and industrial application.

Increasing complexity and aggressive time to market challenges makes the relevance of scale down approach of higher importance for todays biochemical engineering.

The most successful approach to scaling-up is scaling down. This basically means that the process should be designed with the end-goal in mind. The process diagram shows the flow from biomass to product and the recommended design flow in the scale-down approach.

As you can see the bioprocess value chain flows from biomass to product, however the recommended design direction is directly opposite! The scale down approach starts with the reversed process:

• What are the targeted product specifications and needed Downstream Processing (DSP) schemes?
• What is the best choice of feedstock to make the targeted product assuming product-market combinations are already in place?
• What is the targeted industrial scale size? Can I mimic the conditions of this industrial scale size on the lab for developing my process?

The scale down approach is a key success factor for developing a robust pilot scale run, ready for scaling up to commercial production, in a timely and cost effective way.

BPF brings extensive experience in translation of industrial scale processing to the right set of piloting conditions.