Small scale, modular and continuous: A new approach in plant design

Globalization, product diversity, varying customer demands, uncertain markets and shorter product lifetime are new challenges chemical and biochemical companies are facing more and more. As they combine the flexibility of multiproduct batch plants with the efficiency of continuous world scale plants, small scale continuous plants present an alternative production mode suitable to face these challenges. Building these plants from standardized modules can additionally help to reduce time to market and costs. the aim of this work to prove the economical advantages of this concept. The investigations are performed on a multiproduct batch plant for the production of four different recombinant proteins. To prove the concept the production in four continuous modular mono-product plants are benchmarked against the base case. Calculating the investment and operating costs of both concepts and comparing them using discounted cash flow analysis proves, that a change from batch to continuous operation results in a more than 30% higher net present value at the end of the operating period. Designing the continuous plants modularly leads to another 35% higher net present value assuming that the construction period can be reduced from three years to one year by this concept.