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PreFEED, a new vendor to assist process and product development
Summary of the interview article from Chemical Daily, September 6, 2005
A new vendor has been established to provide solutions for chemical industry with its own
unique know-how. PreFEED is the company aims to support process development activities
and its focus is on the gap between experimental work and initial process design. Dr.
Kumagae, the founder of PreFEED, worked for Sumitomo Chemical in R&D organizationand managed a few process simulation vendors from abroad says: “Process simulators arewidely used for the process design these days, but it is becoming more critical to have goodunderstanding the foundation of process simulation at the deeper level to handle more
complex processes. Our plan is to provide solutions through consultancy for the moment,
but we also have a plan to develop our own software in the future.”

PreFEED started its operation in July this year. It is focusing not only on technical aspects
such as experimental data analysis for process design, process modeling & scale-up andsimulation, but also on management aspects such as best practices to improve R&D
efficiency from the viewpoint of internal technology transfer. “In order to shorten the processdevelopment stage without suffering from scale-up troubles, there are several key steps:
finding the best process candidate from the experimental data; modeling of complex
phenomena encountered in crystallization, filtering and drying; simultaneous modeling ofreaction and mixing inside the reactor. These are indispensable studies for the successfulprocess development, and all of them require extra technologies in addition to the current
usage of process simulators”, says Dr. Kumagae. He thinks that all the chemical companies
including specialty chemicals will benefit from PreFEED technologies.

PreFEED also plans to release its own software in several years. “We think there is a goodmarket for reporting software. A technical document during R&D step contains very
important information with many components prepared by different software: reaction
formula and component structure (drawing with information attached); experimental dataand graphs (table and graphs); assumptions and conclusions (text); mechanism ofphenomena (drawing); model (mathematical equations). All the components can be pasted
onto one document, but it is not a live document.” “Researchers in R&D organization work
under continuous changes coming from the new findings every day. They need what we calla live documentation tool; if we change some equations, the calculations changes in thedocument automatically. There are several pieces of software available in the market for thispurpose, but they are used in the very limited manner due to the lack of functionalitiescritical for researchers and process engineers.” “We think this is our important businessarea”, says Dr. Kumagae. Such software is expected to give benefit to process industry byassisting daily works for researchers and engineers.

PreFEED intends to develop Asian market especially for Japan and Korea first and it aims toestablish a high reputation in the region in a few years.
By Atsushi Kurosaka, interviewer