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Modular design principles are well known, but have found only niche applications in the chemical industry. This article outlines an innovative methodology, whereby plant and process design may be conducted in parallel using components with pre-determined specifications and capacities, and operational details emerge uniformly and predictably.
The perception of modular design is that the numerous process schemes in actual practice demand significant customization, which greatly reduces the potential benefits of modularization. To fully leverage the economy of pre-manufactured, mass-produced components, the principle of modularity must he taken much deeper into the process design phase.
With extensive reuse of modular components, it is possible to nearly eliminate specialized field installation, customized piping and structural design. Since its costs improve with repeated implementation. modular design has a synergistic advantage at the smaller plant scale, where it can be competitive with large-scale plants. The economy of scale is shifted from the manufacture of individual chemicals to the production of components that are used to manufacture those chemicals. Lowering the capital and technological harriers to entry opens numerous new business opportunities in diverse applications. The use of modular mini-plants is a disruptive business model for the chemical process industries (CPI), which currently gravitate to large-scale specialized plants.
More than 50 years ago. Lang* determined that the total capital cost of a chemical plant project is four to five limes the cost of the purchased equipment. Despite much awareness of inherent cost-improvement opportunities and the availability of project management and process design tools, the Lang equipment factors today remain mostly unchanged (and have even increased in some cases). That is mainly because the work processes involved in process and project design and implementation have not changed much. We still design and build each plant in a fairly customized way, with freedom to create new specifications. Most chemical plants, even those making the same product, are fairly dissimilar, even when owned by the same company or built by the same engineering contractor.
There are various reasons for this - advanced automation, location-specific environmental constraints, different quality requirements, and technical improvements since the last time the same process was implemented. These factors add to the complexity, and the resulting customization further underscores the paradigm that each plant is unique and sufficiently...