Perspectives on Manufacturing Innovation in Chemical Process Industries

• Published in: ACS Engineering Au 2022-02, Vol.2 (1), p.3-11
• Main Authors: Nandakumar, Krishnaswamy, Joshi, Jyeshtharaj B, Valsaraj, Kalliat T, Nigam, Krishna D. P
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• ISSN: 2694-2488; 2694-2488
• DOI: 10.1021/acsengineeringau.1c00009

The authors discuss the opportunities for achieving rapid innovation cycles in the chemical manufacturing space, a field that is traditionally slow to evolve compared to other industries like automotive, aerospace, and IT industries. The main reason is the enormously complex heterogeneous multiphase, multiscale, reactive mixtures that are handled in such manufacturing facilities. Hence, the flow structure changes with increasing scales of equipment, making it difficult to develop new technologies without extensive pilot-scale testing and without the use of empirical correlations for scaleup. In other industries, the adoption of standards and interoperability has made the incremental adoption of devices (like storage devices as an example) improve the performance in existing equipment. Computers, in particular, have experienced orders of magnitude improvement in performance in a highly heterogeneous environment from tablets to supercomputers and are still able to communicate with each other due to the adoption of standards. The modularization and development of standards for interconnectivity can help accelerate the introduction of innovation to process industries. We discuss some of the possibilities.