Project Chart for Process Intensification Development – PROCIP

The scope of the collaborative project is to develop a technical project management methodology to be able to speed up the decision through the process intensification. For the industrials, process intensification has to allow decreasing the time to market for a product by designing the most optimum process in term of energy consumption, safety, environment considerations, investment cost… The main objective of the project “PROCIP” is therefore the development of a general process intensification methodology which includes a software implementation as well as validation and support via efficient experimental techniques.
To reach the objectives fixed by this project, multidisciplinary skills are necessary (skills in process, in modelling, in PI technologies, in project development, in industrial investment). So, we gathered these skills around the consortium:
- Of industrials: BlueStar Silicones France and Rhodia;
- Of SME: Processium,
- And of complementary laboratories in Chemical engineering :
Nancy-LRGP, Toulouse-LGC, Lyon-LGPC

The association of the skills of these participants appeared as an evidence by their domains of research concerning the process intensification and their objectives to develop industrial demonstrations.

The project is organized in 3 main technical parts:
- Tools and methodologies to measure the basic data of the chemistry or process involved,
- Characterization of equipments, in the field of process intensification : develop standardized methods to compare equipments performances as heat exchange capacity, mixing efficiency, mass transfer coefficient…
- Software for Best Available Technology orientation

The objective fits with the recommendations of the call as it will bring a methology to help the process engineer to think process innovation differently and to share the BAT sooner in the project development phase with the chemists.
On an industrial plan, this work will permit to improve greatly the design of new processes thanks to a powerful software tool to look for the opportunity to implement intensified technologies.
The survey of industrial cases will be done during the project in order to improve the relevance of the results. The industrial applicability will be therefore very fast. The large panel of studied technologies will facilitate portability on a large domain in chemical and pharmaceutical industries …. From the network of the partners and following meetings with Axelera Steering committee on “Factory of the Future”, others industrials are interested to test the software developed in the Procip Project. It is a part of the dissemination but the evaluations will be used to improve and tackle the pitfalls and weaknesses of the software.

On a commercial plan, after the end of the project, Processium will continue the tool improvement in order to make a decision aiding tool usable for new reactive process developments and possibly to spread its application fields while integrating a systemic process vision (separation, environment, chemistry,…). This tool will accompany efforts already hired by Processium in separation process synthesis.