Monday, February 18, 2019

Here Is Information On Pilot Plants

By Edward Foster


Technological advancements keep on occurring each and every day. Also, products based on new technology are invented and sold by companies daily as part of expanding their product portfolio. The role played by new products is to ensure the survival of the company and enable effective competition with other companies in the market. However, not all the ideas companies come up with are worth being commercialized before collecting enough data about them. This is what Pilot plants are all about.

Prior to firms getting in profitable manufacturing of new technologies or products, they first produce on small scale. A pilot plant is a set up that is used to undertake small scale production of products or technologies before commercialization. It is a manufacturing system. New production technology is employed in developing new products founded on new technology in small scale using pilot factories. The main reason for this is to gain knowledge that can be employed in the design of large scale systems of production and marketable items.

The products that are produced from these plants are usually real and can be used for various purposes. First, these products can be used as samples that can be used to test the market. The sample products are given to customers in the targeted market so that they can test them. After testing, customers give feedback, which is then based upon to improve the final product.

Besides using the samples to test the market, they can also be used for quality control. In this case, the sample products are tested by the engineers of the company to determine if it meets the required standards. These standards may be set by the government or they may be internal standards that a company intends to achieve in its products. If the sample products are found not to meet set standards, they are reengineered until they are in compliance.

The phrase pilot plant is largely relative since such plants occur in a broad spectrum of sizes. One distinctive factor, however, is that in comparison to full scale plants, they are smaller. This is because they solely serve learning purposes. Pilot factories can be downscaled or up scaled, depending on goals.

The cost and ease of building these plants often differs from scenario to scenario. Building some plants is simple such that it can be done in a laboratory using stock lab equipment. On the contrary, other plants are costly and very large. It may cost millions of dollars and take several square feet of space to construct complex plants.

Usually, complex plants are custom-made and fabricated from instrumentation, process piping, and equipment. One can use such types of plants to train personnel. The knowledge gained from the pilot plant can then be applied by workers in real life circumstances as they work in full-scale plants.

There are many ways in which these plants minimize risks that come from constructing large process plants. First, the use of semi-empirical methods and computer simulations are used to validate designs and assumptions. Companies therefore avoid risking money before they can be sure that a certain process can be achieved.




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