Pilot plant

Other (non-technical) purposes include gaining public support for new technologies and questioning government regulations.

Also, as pilot plants are intended for learning, they typically are more flexible, possibly at the expense of economy.

On a small chemical scale, in a flask, say, there is a relatively large surface area to liquid ratio.

However, if the reaction in question is scaled up to fit in a 500-gallon tank, the surface area to liquid ratio becomes much smaller.

As a result of this difference in surface area to liquid ratio, the exact nature of the thermodynamics and the reaction kinetics of the process change in a non-linear fashion.

Other factors that may change during the transformation to a production scale include: After data has been collected from operation of a pilot plant, a larger production-scale facility may be built.

Pilot plants will typically have reactors with catalyst volume between 1 and 100 litres, and will often incorporate product separation and gas/liquid recycle with the goal of closing the mass balance.

The design of a demonstration scale plant for a continuous process will closely resemble that of the anticipated future commercial plant, albeit at a much lower throughput, and its goal is to study catalyst performance and operating lifetime over an extended period, while generating significant quantities of product for market testing.