Technical University of Denmark partners towards smarter chemical manufacturing
Taking an idea that works on a small scale in the lab and upscaling it to produce large volumes can be hugely time-consuming and expensive. Because even if a process works without a glitch on a small, experimental scale, it is rarely possible to simply take that idea and use it on a commercial scale.
Most often, large amounts of costly and time-intensive experiments are needed to tweak ideas before you can achieve the same outcome outside the lab.
“Process systems have a multiscale nature – just like our bodies. If I have a pain in my head for example, the root cause could be a microbe in my gut,” Associate Professor at DTU Seyed Soheil Mansouri explains and continues:
“It’s the same thing within the biomanufacturing industry. When we encounter a problem in the process, the solution to address that problem may be found somewhere else. So, we need an insight into how these different scales–all the way from the molecular or atomic scale to the enterprise-wide scale–interact with and influence each other.”
Less brute force testing
DTU has a state-of-the-art pilot plant that is used to turn ideas that involve chemical and biological processes into commercial reality. In the pilot plant, users can test and validate and qualify strategies until problems are sorted and the idea is commercially ready.
To avoid unnecessary testing, users take advantage of modelling to narrow down the areas that are likely causing problems so they can focus testing on these areas. “Rather than having to conduct experiment after experiment after experiment and failing and failing and failing using brute force, we think more intelligently,” Seyed Soheil Mansouri explains.
In a new project, researchers from DTU will partner with American AI-experts, Zapata Computing, to explore how utilizing quantum-inspired algorithms (see explanation below) can bring an idea to market cheaper and faster by reducing the search space even further, thus avoiding a lot of the brute force experimentation.
“Bringing together our knowledge of chemical and biological processes with Zapata’s expertise in advanced computational calculations we aim to develop more advanced algorithms that can tackle the problems that we cannot today,” Seyed Soheil Mansouri says.