Preface

I have a long career of 33 years in Shell on processes for oil refining, bulk chemicals, biomass refining, biotechnology and fine chemicals and also worked in every innovation stage – exploratory research, process research, process development, process design, process start-ups and process de-bottlenecking.

I have seen many failures in each innovation step from idea to commercial implementation. I searched many times the literature to see what is available to prevent these failures from happening, but found only a few articles describing only a few critical elements for successful process innovation and scale-up.

When I started my own consultancy company I gave a course on sustainable process design, which included a section on scale-up. The attendees from industry were very interested and asked me lots of questions which I answered directly, drawing from my experiences. Afterwards I realised that the answers I gave probably could not be found in any book. I checked this by a literature search and indeed the book on process scale-up with technical and organisational guidelines for each step from idea to implementation with the focus on risk reduction and increasing the chances of success was not available. This triggered me to write this book. It contains guidelines and methods and case examples mostly derived not only from my experiences but also from publications by authors experienced in industrial process scale-up.

I think that this book will be of use in the process industries for anyone active in any part of the process research, development, design, start-up or operation. This book will probably also be of use in education, as it contains lots of information about the process industries, their structure, technologies and scale-up methods.