FOAK process engineering

What makes FOAK different

Conventional plant design borrows heavily from precedent. FOAK design cannot. There is no similar unit to benchmark against, vendors will not guarantee performance in an unfamiliar service, and the usual heuristics — a typical tray efficiency, a normal fouling factor, a standard turndown — may not apply at all.

That does not mean designing on faith. It means being explicit about which numbers are known, which are assumed, and which are guesses, and then designing the de-risking programme around the guesses.

Our approach

1. Build the design basis from chemistry up. Mass and energy balance, phase behaviour, materials compatibility, thermal stability.
2. Identify the scale-dependent unknowns. Usually mixing, heat removal, solids and impurity accumulation.
3. Write a scale-up risk register. Each unknown gets an owner, a test that resolves it, and a cost.
4. Design the experiment, not just the plant. The pilot campaign is specified to close the register.
5. Stage the capital. Nobody should commit commercial capex against an open register.

Common sectors

Biomaterials and biorefining, battery and electrode chemicals, carbon capture and utilisation, specialty and electronic-grade chemicals, waste valorisation and recycling. All share the same structure: novel chemistry, real thermodynamics, and investors who need a credible capex number before the process is fully de-risked.

What investors ask for

In technical diligence the recurring questions are the mass balance, the energy intensity per tonne of product, the capex basis, and the plan to get from current scale to commercial. A FOAK design basis answers all four in a form a technical diligence consultant can check.