Hello good people!
I hope you are doing well. It’s me again: Donald Zinsou from JPP-II (Production department).

It is almost the end of the month of March, which means to me the end of our one-year training in the production plants of JUZEN. It has been a very interesting and useful training that helped me to understand not only the various parameters that can influence the quality of the final products (I described some of them in my previous blog), but also to become familiar with the equipment and the possible risks and dangers during their manipulations. During this year, I visited and worked in the three main plants of JUZEN (JPP-III, JPP-II and JPP-I) as an operator, which make me be in direct contact with the reactors, valves, and other machines. I learned how to process each operation from the introduction of reactants, the control of the temperature to the extraction and collection of the final powder.

This experience allowed me to be able to describe the different production facilities and therefore, to understand the strengths of our company. It also allowed me to see things from the production prospective, which is important in designing production process as a researcher.

For example, in the laboratory we generally use a glass rounded-bottom flask with a PTFE stirrer blade to collect data (see picture beyond). The internal volume is generally < 2L.

But the shape totally differ from the actual reactional tank on site. Here are examples of the actual reactional and crystallization tank on the production site.

They are made in different materials such as Glass (GL) or Stainless Steel (SUS) and the internal volume varies from 200 L to 10000 L. Moreover, the type of agitator change with the objective of the mixing: we will prefer for instance an anchor type mixer for crystallization and a Pfauder impeller for chemical reaction.

Therefore, in order to reproduce the data collected in lab, it is necessary to scale-up the numerical values of the operating conditions according to the size of the actual machines to be used on site. And this will be the new challenges that are waiting for me from April in the R&D department.