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Chemical Engineering vocabulary · Scale-Up and Process Development

Scale up

Meaning in chemical engineering, with examples

phrasal verbCore term

In chemical engineering, scale up means: To take a process that works in the lab or a pilot plant and design it to run at a much larger, commercial size.

In Turkish: ölçek büyütmek, büyük ölçeğe taşımak

How it is used

Used in R&D, process development and project meetings. You scale up a reaction, a process or a product 'from lab to plant'. The noun is 'scale-up', with a hyphen: 'scale-up problems', 'scale-up factor'. The opposite is 'scale down'.

Example sentences

  1. Mixing and heat removal are the biggest risks when we scale up this reaction.

  2. The process was scaled up from a 5-liter flask to a 10 m³ reactor.

Common collocations

  • scale up a process
  • scale up from lab to plant
  • scale-up study
  • scale-up factor
  • pilot plantA small version of a planned production plant, between laboratory and full scale, used to test the process, collect design data and make sample product.
  • bench scaleThe smallest stage of process development, using laboratory equipment of a few milliliters to a few liters to test chemistry and collect first data.
  • design basisThe agreed set of data and assumptions that a plant design is based on, such as capacity, feed and product specifications, site conditions and design margins.
  • heat transfer coefficientA number that shows how easily heat passes from one fluid to another through a wall, measured in W/(m²·K). The higher it is, the smaller the exchanger can be.
  • agitatorA motor-driven shaft with one or more impellers that mixes the contents of a tank or reactor to keep solids suspended, spread heat and help reactions.

This word in other fields

The same English word can have a different meaning in another field:

More terms: Scale-Up and Process Development

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