Lesson plan
Process miniaturization
Chemical process miniaturization refers to a philosophical concept within the discipline of process design that challenges the notion of "economy of scale" or "bigger is better." In this context, process design refers to the discipline taught primarily to chemical engineers. However, the emerging discipline of process miniaturization will involve integrated knowledge from many areas; as examples, systems engineering and design, remote measurement and control using intelligent sensors, biological process systems engineering, and advanced manufacturing robotics, etc. One of the challenges of chemical engineering has been to design processes based on chemical laboratory-scale methods, and to scale-up processes so that products can be manufactured that are economically affordable. As a process becomes larger, more product can be produced per unit time, so when a process technology becomes established or mature and operates consistently without upsets or "downtime," more economic efficiency can be gained from scale-up. Given a fixed price for the feedstock (e.g., the price per barrel of crude oil), the product cost can be decreased using a larger-scale process because the capital investment and operational costs do not normally increase linearly with scale.…
Article summary
Chemical process miniaturization refers to a philosophical concept within the discipline of process design that challenges the notion of "economy of scale" or "bigger is better." In this context, process design refers to the discipline taught primarily to chemical engineers. However, the emerging discipline of process miniaturization will involve integrated knowledge from many areas; as examples, systems engineering and design, remote measurement and control using intelligent sensors, biological process systems engineering, and advanced manufacturing robotics, etc. One of the challenges of chemical engineering has been to design processes based on chemical laboratory-scale methods, and to scale-up processes so that products can be manufactured that are economically affordable. As a process becomes larger, more product can be produced per unit time, so when a process technology becomes established or mature and operates consistently without upsets or "downtime," more economic efficiency can be gained from scale-up. Given a fixed price for the feedstock (e.g., the price per barrel of crude oil), the product cost can be decreased using a larger-scale process because the capital investment and operational costs do not normally increase linearly with scale.…
Key claims
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Discussion questions
- Summarise the article in your own words. Which single claim would you verify first, and why?
- Which claim in this article is most likely to be revised as the sources update? How would you check its current status?
- If two sources disagreed about one of these facts, what would you need in order to trust one over the other?
Bibliography
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Key claims and bibliography are generated from the same tracked claims and sources as the article page.