Focus Areas
Zenithal has four main focus areas to support chemical process innovation. These areas are: Process Design & Development, Executive Support, Reaction Engineering & Reactor Design, and Technical Computing. Each area is detailed below.
PROCESS DESIGN & DEVELOPMENT
Novel processes at small scale are frequently batch, periodic, and/or low-pressure processes. To scale successfully, processes generally need to be converted to continuous, and pressures need to be moderately increased. But every process is different, and has its own unique characteristics. Zenithal has design experience to help avoid these common pitfalls. Then we can assist in scaling processes from bench to pilot scale, as well as taking pilot data to design and construct demonstration or commercial-scale equipment.
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Demonstration scale unit constructed to produce ethylene from methane gas via oxidative coupling of methane (OCM) at Siluria Technologies.
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Throughout the scaling process, there are many value improving practices that Zenithal can help your organization achieve, such as proper technology selection, process simplification, energy optimization, and waste minimization. Coupling these with other high-value practices such as periodic constructability reviews, process reliability modeling, and predictive maintenance scheduling increases the likelihood of an on-schedule and on-budget build at any scale.
When scaling processes through pilot scale, myriad engineering documents are created and need to be properly managed. For many startups, this is their first foray into documentation approvals & reviews, document control, and other standardization methods. Zenithal can provide structure around developing heat and material balances (HMB), process simulations, flow diagrams of all types (BFD, PFD, P&ID), controls narratives, damage mechanisms for metallurgy, different flavors of failure modes and effects analysis (FMEA), regulatory compliance, and safety processes (HAZID, HAZOP, LOPA, etc.).
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EXECUTIVE SUPPORT
What is your team doing this week? What are they doing next month? Does your team utilize OKRs? Are we focused on the correct problems? Are we solving them quickly enough? As a leader, these are ever present questions, and Zenithal can help guide your team toward answering them.
An organization needs to define success for their process or product. Most organizations' sole focus is on the binary innovation — creating that next new thing, and making it work. But the work doesn’t, and shouldn’t, stop there.
Techno-economic assessments need to be made, looking at both CapEx and OpEx. A robust cash-cost or COGS model needs to be developed, understanding how each factor affects the business: materials, utilities, labor, indirects, capital depreciation. Then finance principles need to be applied to examine cash flows over time, determine payback periods, and ultimately assess profitability.
Risk assessment is a key tool to execute projects on-schedule and on-budget. First-of-its-kind processes lack the operational history to complete a proper risk analysis. Zenithal has the experience to examine risks and provide preliminary scoring for processes with limited time on-stream. When done properly, this process decreases the blood pressure of your engineering staff, provides a roadmap for ongoing development, and helps determine the necessary resources to scale efficiently.
Zenithal also provides technology, business strategy, due-diligence, portfolio analysis, and intellectual property advisory services for venture capital, private equity, family offices, sovereign wealth funds, and foundations.
REACTION ENGINEERING & REACTOR DESIGN
Zenithal’s Principal completed a PhD in chemical engineering, studying reaction engineering, reactor design, and surface chemistry. Conversion from one material to another is at the heart of everything that we do. Zenithal has direct experience designing and operating fluidized bed and rotary reactors to produce solid materials via additive manufacturing. One of the first projects our Principal constructed was a fluidized bed that operated under vacuum so that an inductively-coupled plasma could be struck in the freeboard section of the reactor, for deposition of ceramics on crystalline organic material at low temperatures.
Bench-scale plasma fluidized bed reactor for ALD applications.
Zenithal has experience designing and operating heterogeneous catalysis reactors (packed beds, fluid beds, multi-tubular, CSTRs) as well as homogeneous CSTRs for polymer applications. These reactors have been contructed at scales as varied as 2mm in diameter, to over four-stories tall. Reactors have been built for both adiabatic and heat exchange processes, with traditional coolants such as air, water, and oils, as well as with less-traditional molten salts.
Each reaction needs to be understood in detail, to determine co-product generation, possible deactivation or fouling mechanisms, and kinetic rates. This information is coupled with transport effects, to predict reactor scaling. This happens through a structured approach of increasing reactor scale, with supplemental lab-scale or microreactor data, such as differential reactor data. Zenithal has experience in designing these experiments and successfully using them to scale reactors.
TECHNICAL COMPUTING
There’s nothing wrong with Excel or Google Sheets. But engineers are trained to do so much more than work within the confines of a spreadsheet. Modern engineering uses programming languages such as Python & R, or computational fluid dynamics packages, such as Fluent & Comsol, to complete engineering tasks that are impossible within a spreadsheet.
Powerful Python libraries such as Pandas and Numpy are at the heart of your team’s data science capabilities. These can be supplemented with machine learning libraries such as Scikit-learn, Tensorflow, or PyTorch to deploy AI capabilities within your organization. Zenithal has experience using these tools for offline data analysis, or connecting them to a process historian for real-time process insights for operators and sustaining engineers.
As mentioned previously, reaction engineering is at the heart of Zenithal’s capabilities, and we have extensive experience using Cantera as the platform to unify chemical kinetics with data science. We have experience running simple reactions through this platform, as well as complex heterogeneous/homogeneous systems with hundreds of species and thousands of reactions.