Scale-up

Scaling up a process from laboratory to pilot plant and further to commercial scale production is one of the most challenging and exciting subject for a chemical engineer, as it calls for in-depth understanding of chemical engineering principles and innovative out of the box thinking to translate a concept into reality. As we are organising a workshop this weekend on 'Process Development and Scale-up in Fine Chemical Industry', I am transported back to my classroom and seized by the excitement of it all over again. As I was browsing the Internet for some good reading material on scale-up, I was struck by the paucity of good free resources. But I came across this gem of an article on Scale up of liquid and semisolid manufacturing processes that points out some major obstacles to effective scale-up and describes methods available to pharmaceutical scientists for addressing scalability issues.