Process Control

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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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Industrial Grade Chemometrics: from Laboratory to Process Implementation – APACT 2024 Program

Venue: April 24, 2024, 8:30am – 9:10am Hyatt Regency Hotel, New Brunswick, NJ Industrial Grade Chemometrics: from Laboratory to Process Implementation Presented by: Brian Rohrback, President, Infometrix, Inc. Abstract: The use of multivariate statistics, whether termed chemometrics or machine learning or (fill in the blank), is critical for industry to move from human-centered processing to more automated, objectively reliable processes. In the laboratory world, we seek to discover new routes for solving problems that will give us better solutions than previous methods. And this largely university-based effort is critical for enabling improvements in product manufacturing and the quality control process that accompanies it. But, given academia’s limited access to commercial application samples, most chemometrics publications deal only with the method development side of a given problem. If we are going to benefit a manufacturing organization, an industry, or especially society, the emphasis needs to be on the shift from this laboratory origin to a solid process implementation. Anything useful we devise must ultimately get used; if we fail to integrate proven technology into the day-to-day, the development process is simply an expense. The experience through the now five decades of implementing multivariate solutions has identified some steps, some barriers, and some low-hanging fruit. How do we succeed in pushing new technology the last mile? Register at APACT 2024.
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APACT 2024 Program is available

APACT USA 2024Venue: April 23-25, 2024 Hyatt Regency Hotel, New Brunswick, NJ Infometrix is a proud sponsor for APACT USA 2024 Conference. Get the program, list of key speakers, registration information and other details from the APACT website. Don’t miss out on this incredible opportunity to connect, learn, and grow at APACT USA 2024 Conference. Register at APACT 2024.
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APACT 2024 (Plenary) – Industrial Grade Chemometrics: from Laboratory to Process Implementation

APACT 2024Venue: April 23-25, 2024 Hyatt Regency Hotel, New Brunswick, NJ Presented by: Brian Rohrback, Ph.D., MBA, President, Infometrix, Inc. Abstract: The use of multivariate statistics, whether termed chemometrics or machine learning or (fill in the blank), is critical for industry to move from human-centered processing to more automated, objectively reliable processes. In the laboratory world, we seek to discover new routes for solving problems that will give us better solutions than previous methods. And this largely university-based effort is critical for enabling improvements in product manufacturing and the quality control process that accompanies it. But, given academia’s limited access to commercial application samples, most chemometrics publications deal only with the method development side of a given problem. If we are going to benefit a manufacturing organization, an industry, or especially society, the emphasis needs to be on the shift from this laboratory origin to a solid process implementation. Anything useful we devise must ultimately get used; if we fail to integrate proven technology into the day-to-day, the development process is simply an expense. The experience through the now five decades of implementing multivariate solutions has identified some steps, some barriers, and some low-hanging fruit. How do we succeed in pushing new technology the last mile? Register at APACT 2024.
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ATC 2024 – Fundamentals of Quality Control Employing Optical Spectroscopy

ATC 2024Venue: April 15-19, 2024 Galveston Island Convention Center Presented by: Brian Rohrback, Ph.D., MBA, President, Infometrix, Inc.   Abstract: Obviously, to control quality in manufacturing, one needs to have some way of measuring the quality of the process and the product. Also critical is to optimize the action plan on how to process signal to gain the information content, to deliver the answers, and to facilitate maintenance. The field of optical spectroscopy has been critical to QC operations as a set of non-destructive technologies providing insight into the chemistry of the product. Spectrometers can deliver chemical information quickly and the on-going cost of ownership is relatively low. The quality of the information content will be a function of the analytical technology behind the instrument (NIR, Raman, UV-Vis) and analyzer calibration; the calibration task is the only one that falls to the end user on a routine basis. Maintaining best practices for spectroscopic calibration and identifying areas where the process can be streamlined is critical to preserve the value in the company’s investment in optical spectroscopy. Register at https://www.analyzertechconference.org/.