Importance of Mixing

Process objectives are critical for successful manufacturing of a product. If the mixing scale-up fails the required yield, quality, or physical properties of the product and the costs of manufacturing may be significantly increased. Failure to provide the necessary mixing may result in severe manufacturing problems on scale-up, ranging from costly corrections in the plant to complete failure of a process. The costs associated with these problems are far greater than the cost of adequately evaluating and solving the mixing issues during process development. Conversely, the economic potential of improved mixing performance is substantial. Therefore, at the heart of any scale-up chemical process, there has to be a fundamental understanding of how the mixing processes in a lab reactor compares to the mixing performance of a full scale process vessel which is targeted to receive the lab developed process.

Webinar Presenter
Reinaldo (Ray) Machado is President of rm2 Technologies LLC, a company focused on teaching the application of practical mixing technology. Ray is also employed by Air Products and Chemicals, Inc. in Allentown, PA. He currently teaches industrial courses on the fundamentals of scale-up at Lehigh University.  Ray has technical experience in applied reactor engineering, scale-up of chemical reaction processes, mass transfer, heat transfer, applied reaction calorimetry, hydrogenation, electrochemical engineering, sulfonation, amination, propoxylation, polymerization, and plastics recycling.