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A pilot plant is a small industrial system which is operated to generate information about the behavior of the system for use in design of larger facilities. Pilot plant is a relative term in the sense that plants are typically smaller than full-scale production plants, but are built in a range of sizes. Some pilot plants are built in laboratories using stock lab equipment, while others require substantial engineering efforts, cost millions of dollars, and are custom assembled and fabricated from process equipment, instrumentation and piping. They can also be used to train personnel for a full-scale plant. ==Risk management== Pilot plants are used to reduce the risk associated with construction of large process plants. They do so in several ways: *Computer simulations and semi-empirical methods are used to determine the limitations of the pilot scale system. These mathematical models are then tested in a physical pilot-scale plant. Various modeling methods are used for scale-up. These methods include: * *Chemical similitude studies * *Mathematical modeling * *Aspen Plus/Aspen HYSYS modeling * *Finite Elemental Analysis (FEA) * *Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) * * *These theoretical modeling methods return the following: * * * *Finalized mass and energy balances * * * *Optimized system design and capacity * * * *Equipment requirements * * * *System limitations * * * *The basis for determining the cost to build the pilot module *They are substantially less expensive to build than full-scale plants. The business does not put as much capital at risk on a project that may be inefficient or unfeasible. Further, design changes can be made more cheaply at the pilot scale and kinks in the process can be worked out before the large plant is constructed. *They provide valuable data for design of the full-scale plant. Scientific data about reactions, material properties, corrosiveness, for instance, may be available, but it is difficult to predict the behavior of a process of any complexity. Engineering data from other process may be available, but this data can not always be clearly applied to the process of interest. Designers use data from the pilot plant to refine their design of the production scale facility. If a system is well defined and the engineering parameters are known, pilot plants are not used. For instance, a business that wants to expand production capacity by building a new plant that does the same thing as an existing plant may choose to not use a pilot plant. Additionally, advances in process simulation on computers have increased the confidence of process designers and reduced the need for pilot plants. However, they are still used as even state-of-the-art simulation cannot accurately predict the behavior of complex systems. 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Pilot plant」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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