Optimization

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CPAC 2025 Summer Institute, July 29-31

CPAC 2025 Summer InstituteDate: July 29-31, 2025

Rapidly changing trends in the discovery, development and production of new products for Pharmaceuticals, Specialty chemicals, and performance materials requires the effective use of new processing technology to speed development while ensuring the use of high quality, low cost and reliably production practices.  This is even more important with the growing use of biobased materials and post-consumer products as feedstocks to improve sustainability while insuring cost competitive production processes. The 2025 CPAC Summer Institute will be built on two themes.

1)    Next generation processing approaches to enable maximum efficiency in the production of sustainable materials (pharmaceuticals, chemicals, and biomaterials)

2)    Expanding process understanding based on the use of sensors and data handling – Enabling more efficient process optimization and control of complex bio-based processes and petrochemical operations as well as expanding the use of sensors for personalized medicine.

The first theme of sustainable process development and production will include an emphasis on exploring new reaction routes that benefit from the growing use of continuous flow technology and effective monitoring concepts. The evolution of flow microscale reaction technology has led to a wide range of process intensification developments. These include, often using novel operating windows for one-pot and cascade reactions, in the various steps that result in the ability to rapidly evaluate and optimize new reaction routes as well as offering more cost-effective processing. The key next step is the integration of these unit operations into end-to-end optimized continuous processes.

Next generation continuous manufacturing concepts will enable efficient end-to-end bio-processing for the implementation of a sustainable circular economy; based on the data from process analytical technology, PAT, required for rapid characterization of organism growth as well as post reaction processing including product separation and purification.

The second theme will be based on powerful new applications of continuous sensing and control.  Just as continuous monitoring can have a significant impact on stable, high efficiency production of chemicals it has also been shown to have a significant impact in the Personalized Medicine area. This second theme will explore the potential of using the pattern of data from groups of simple sensors for faster and better understanding and control in a range of simple sensors for applications in process development including organism growth to enable better product synthesis, and then more efficient post reaction processing.

Of importance to both themes are:

• Recent advances in PAT for the real time characterization of raw materials, process streams, and complex biomass streams – to improve process understanding. This data can be used for rapid process development and for feed forward and feedback control to enable high-quality, cost-effective products.

• Utilization of new approaches in data handling including the use of big data and its characterization by AI methods — for end-to-end understanding and value extraction from chemical and biomass processing.

• Recognition of the importance of solution providers – those companies and academic research groups that have developed measurement approaches, data handling approaches, and engineering concepts for process control

The three-day schedule ends on Thursday afternoon with a BBQ dinner off-site event. The final afternoon will summarize the technical areas and meld the conclusions into a broader look at the future impact of Process Analytical Technology (PAT) for achieving Process Optimization.

CPAC has an established track record in fostering academic/industrial/national laboratory interactions, which aims at bridging the gap between basic research and full-scale process/product development. CPAC’s Summer Institute will provide continuing education opportunities in the areas of advances in measurement science linked to process control.

The CPAC Summer Institutes are held in an informal format, with technical presentations, and time allotted for open discussion and brainstorming on topics that arise from this interaction. The informal environment has created a successful multi-disciplinary format for bringing together chemists, biologists, measurement scientists, and process engineers from industry, government, and academic institutions.

REGISTRATION Fees for the 2024 Summer Institute are $500.00 US Dollars. The fees cover all meeting materials, Tuesday dinner, lunches, and a BBQ dinner on Thursday. Please complete the registration form on the following site or contact:

http://mkcontrol.com/summer-institute-2025.html

Mel Koch, kochm@mkopt.net (cell) +1 206 992 1001 or,

Nan Holmes, nsh@uw.edu, (cell) +1 206 484 4399

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IFPAC 2025 – Infometrix Presentations. Don’t Miss it.

Date: Monday, March 2-5, 2025
Venue:  Bethesda, MD (Washington, D.C.)
website: www.ifpacglobal.org

For more information, contact info@infometrix.com.

Topic:
Sensors/Soft Sensors/Probes/Optics

Advanced Separations: FastGC, HPLC & Data Systems

Author: Brian Rohrback, President

Real Time Data Analysis for Process Development: UPDATE (Abstract #139)

Abstract: We have been musing in the broader business community about broad AI approaches to data analysis, but a narrower focus is much more likely to generate near-term results. Luckily, we have tools that can be placed into the process that simplify the effort of building custom integrated systems.  Here we will discuss current techniques and show how the value of the information stream can be improved by more timely integrated data analysis.  But there is still effort to expend and timeliness is not the only issue. Any desired property metric will likely be only lightly correlated to the bits of data being assembled, so blending the information from disparate sources is necessary.  Looking at the options for data and model fusion shows that improvement is possible, and the answer is mostly free.  What results is a customizable system that can cater to any process or even personalized health evaluation.

Minimizing Error in Calibrating Spectrometers (Abstract #286)

Abstract: The adage “you can’t control what you don’t measure” may be old but it will always hold true. In industrial quality control settings, we choose to deploy optical spectrometers as a mechanism for measuring the chemistry and the physical attributes of the products we produce.  Spectroscopy’s advantage is that it is non-destructive, extremely fast, can be run on-line, and provides quantitative information through the characterization of functional groups in the sample.  Understanding the limits to spectroscopy’s accuracy and precision for a given application is governed by factors we can control and understand plus those that are out of our control.  To minimize error in spectroscopy assessments, there are three primary software-related areas to tackle, two of which the practitioner only needs to do once.

  1. At the start, a method needs to be set that optimizes how future spectra will be manipulated and involves choice of preprocessing and wavelength range plus algorithm selection.
  2. The other early process is to understand the precision of the laboratory methods and how they impact models.
  3. On a continuous basis, a maintenance effort is required to determine the optimum number of factors and identify outliers that degrade model performance.

The History of Chemometrics in Routine Chromatographic Analysis (Abstract #2)

Abstract: There is a rich history of the use of chemometrics both for signal processing and for pattern recognition analysis that dates back a half century now.  The first documented commercial implementations began in the early 1980s, predating the use of “personal” computers.  In considering use for routine quality measurements, the technology divides between signal processing (alignment, curve resolution) and automated interpretation (classification, quantitation, mixture analysis).  The use of standard chemometrics technology vastly reduces the time required to process chromatographic data in a quality control environment and it enables unsupervised chromatographic analysis and interpretation.

Bio:

Brian Rohrback is the President and CEO of Infometrix and has managed the company for several decades.  He has steered Infometrix into position as the dominant independent supplier of chemometrics technology to analytical instrument companies, process analyzer suppliers, and their customers.  His expertise is in the integration of multivariate data processing for process analyzers and laboratory instruments catering to routine quality analysis. Rohrback holds a B.S. and Ph.D. in chemistry specializing in the processing of chromatographic data, plus went to the dark side to get an MBA. His publications span 50 years and cover topics in petroleum exploration, chemical plant optimization, clinical and pharmaceutical diagnostics, informatics, pattern recognition, and multivariate analysis.  In 2016, he was presented the ISA Excellence in Analytical Technical Innovation Award for revolutionary work in the field of chromatography. He has a passion for Classic cars and nearly all aspects of chemistry and process science.

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Analytically Speaking Podcast Ep. 33 – Automating Chemometrics for Expert Calibration System

Analytically Speaking Podcast Ep. 33 Host Dr. Jerry Workman speaks with Dr. Brian G. Rohrback to discuss to his research and experience in automating the process of building multivariate calibrations.

Enjoy the podcast. For more information and further conversation, contact us at info@infometrix.com.

Click to access Analytically Speaking Podcast Ep.33

 

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Augmented Models

Picture a situation where a company has a spectrometer and model that is performing well in a quality control setting. The company wants to set up a second spectrometer for another line or another location. Normally, we need to wait until enough spectra and reference values are available to be able to build a competent model, which can take months, even a year. In Ai-Metrix, a customer can choose to jointly model a data-rich spectrometer with a data poor instrument. If Ai-Metrix sees a discrepancy in data amounts, it clicks in a new set of optimization parameters and builds an augmented model that should be available within days. The model will not be as good as a well-populated calibration, but the system would then dial itself in as more data becomes available. Because Ai-Metrix does not care how many models a user creates, the marginal cost for this series of model updates is essentially zero. And you can put the spectrometer to use right away.

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IFPAC 2024 – Chemometrics in the Cloud

IFPAC 2024Venue: March 3-6, 2024 Bethesda North Marriott Hotel and Conference Center Presented by: Brian Rohrback, Ph.D., MBA, President, Infometrix, Inc. Abstract: In the spirit of automation, there are cloud-based tools from both the chemometrics and the general statistics realms that can be applied to simplify the work involved in optimizing a calibration. Robust statistical techniques require some set-up of parameters, but once established for an application, they are often usable in every other instance of that application. The result is a one-pass automated means of selecting optimal samples for a calibration problem and, in turn, simplifies and automates the assignment of model rank. In the end case, this means that a spectrometer can essentially become an appliance; take it out of the box, plug it in, and enjoy. The capability exists to have a spectrometer self-tune and adapt to a specific application, then keep the spectrometer in appropriate calibration completely through closed-loop control. Automation of best practices needs to include how to match laboratory reference data to spectral data, an unbiased approach to selecting validation samples, an optimal mechanism for model construction, establishing standards for quality reports, tracking model performance over time, handling process or ingredient transitions, and much more. Register at www.IFPACglobal.org/attendee-registration.