Pilot Plants, Lab-Scale & R&D Units

Beyond pharmaceutical and food product development, pilot and R&D units are widely used in chemical process engineering for reaction kinetics studies and catalyst screening, biochar and biomass conversion research for optimizing pyrolysis and carbonization parameters before full-scale plant investment, coating and surface treatment development when qualifying new substrate-coating combinations, and advanced materials research where novel formulations need controlled small-scale validation before scale-up. Renewable energy technology developers use pilot gasification and biomass conversion units to validate feedstock behavior before committing to commercial-scale system design. Specialty chemical and polymer producers use pilot reactors to optimize new formulations under realistic process conditions. Any industry developing a new thermal, chemical, or biological process benefits from pilot-scale validation, since the cost of discovering a process limitation at pilot scale is a small fraction of discovering it after full-scale commissioning.

Kerone typically provides operator training covering equipment operation, safety interlocks, and data acquisition system use, along with process development support to help the research team establish baseline operating parameters for their specific application. Documentation includes equipment manuals, P&ID drawings, and calibration certificates for installed instrumentation. For GMP-compliant units, IQ/OQ/PQ validation support helps the client's quality team establish the documentation trail required for regulatory submissions. Ongoing technical support is available for troubleshooting process issues that arise during the experimental phase, since pilot work often surfaces questions that weren't anticipated during initial commissioning. Kerone's own R&D center also offers contract pilot trial services for companies that want to validate a process before committing to purchasing dedicated pilot equipment of their own.

Kerone's pilot and lab units are built with modular process sections and reconfigurable parameter ranges specifically so a single piece of equipment can support testing across different formulations, feedstocks, or product variants without requiring separate dedicated equipment for each. Removable process modules, adjustable temperature and pressure ranges, and flexible material handling fixtures allow the same core unit to run trials on, for example, multiple powder formulations or biomass feedstock types in sequence. Validated cleaning protocols between trials prevent cross-contamination when switching between formulations, which is particularly important for pharmaceutical and food-grade applications. This flexibility is valuable for research organizations running a continuous pipeline of different product trials, since it avoids the capital cost of separate equipment for every formulation under development while still generating scale-up-relevant data for each.

Scale-up typically follows a staged approach: pilot data establishes the validated process window, including optimal temperature, residence time, and other critical parameters, after which the commercial equipment is designed to replicate the same dimensionless relationships at full throughput. Kerone's engineering team uses the pilot data to size heat exchangers, reactor volumes, and material handling capacity for the commercial system, validating that scale-up correlations hold before finalizing the full design. A demonstration or pre-commercial run at an intermediate scale is sometimes warranted for processes with significant scale-sensitive behavior, particularly in solids handling or mixing-dependent reactions. Throughout this process, retaining the original pilot equipment for ongoing formulation development and troubleshooting after commercial launch is common practice, since production-scale equipment isn't well suited for the frequent reconfiguration that ongoing R&D requires.

Building in-house pilot capability makes sense for organizations running continuous, high-frequency R&D programs where dedicated equipment availability and confidentiality outweigh the capital cost of ownership. Partnering with an external provider's pilot facility, such as Kerone's own R&D center, suits companies running occasional trials, validating a single new process before a capital decision, or lacking the technical staff to operate specialized pilot equipment safely and effectively. External partnership also provides access to a broader range of process technologies than most companies would justify purchasing for occasional use. Many organizations use a hybrid approach, maintaining basic lab-scale equipment in-house for routine formulation work while using external pilot facilities for less frequent, larger-scale validation trials that would otherwise sit idle most of the year if purchased outright.

Pilot-scale data is reliable for scale-up prediction only when the pilot unit preserves the key dimensionless ratios and process dynamics that govern the specific process, such as residence time distribution, heat and mass transfer coefficients, and mixing patterns relevant to the application. Kerone designs pilot units to be functionally and geometrically representative of the full-scale equivalent rather than simply a smaller version with different proportions, which is what makes the resulting data trustworthy for scale-up decisions. A common misconception is that any reduction in scale preserves these relationships automatically, when in practice naive scale-down can distort critical parameters like surface-area-to-volume ratio in ways that make the data misleading. Buyers should ask specifically how scale-up correlation has been validated for their process type before relying on pilot results for capital investment decisions.

A frequent mistake is selecting a pilot unit that is too small or too simplified relative to the intended full-scale process, which produces data that does not scale reliably because key geometric or flow ratios differ between the pilot and the eventual commercial system. Companies sometimes skip pilot trials entirely under time pressure and move straight to a full commercial build, only to discover process issues at a much higher cost once production scale equipment is already installed. Another common error is underestimating the instrumentation needed to capture useful data, building a pilot unit with manual controls and minimal logging that cannot generate the statistically meaningful dataset required for confident scale-up decisions. Engaging a partner experienced in scale-up correlation, rather than treating the pilot unit as a smaller, cheaper version of the final system, avoids most of these issues.

Kerone's pilot units range from lab-scale units processing grams per hour up to pilot-scale systems handling several hundred kilograms per hour, depending on the process type.

Yes, Kerone designs pilot systems with dimensionally equivalent geometry and process dynamics to ensure that scale-up correlations are reliable and valid.

Yes, Kerone offers GMP-compliant pilot plants with full documentation, material certification, IQ/OQ/PQ validation support, and audit trail capabilities.

Many Kerone pilot units feature modular process sections that can be rearranged or replaced to accommodate different process configurations and experimental programs.

Yes, Kerone provides pilot testing services at its own facilities and also offers rental options for clients who need temporary access to specific processing technologies.

Kerone integrates multi-channel data loggers, real-time visualization dashboards, and exportable data formats including CSV and OPC-UA for process analysis.

Delivery time for custom pilot plants typically ranges from 6 to 14 weeks depending on complexity, customization requirements, and component availability.

Yes, Kerone designs pilot units in both batch and continuous configurations, and some units support switchable operation between both modes for maximum experimental flexibility.