Senior Process Engineer for the design and construction of a multi-product industrial enzyme plant expansion. The $60 million Phase 1 included installation of a new fermentation building with seed and production fermentors, harvest chillers, batch mixing tanks, and sterile nutrient dosing tanks as well as laboratory and office facilities. The $30 million Phase 2 included addition of seed and production fermentors to the Phase 1 building. Responsibilities included review of P&IDs and general arrangement drawings, design of process control strategies, preparation of standard and emergency operating procedures, loop tests, water batches, sterility tests, and plant start-up in collaboration with the project automation team.
| Unit operations: Fermentation, Starch liquefaction, Sterile nutrient dosing, Anhydrous ammonia dosing, Broth chilling, Pneumatic conveying |
| Products: Glucoamylase, α-Amylases, Protease, Lipase, Cellulase |
| Company: Novo Nordisk BioChem North America, Inc. |
| Location: Franklinton, North Carolina |
| Total installed cost: $90 million |
I joined Novo Nordisk in 1992 and was one of the first process engineers hired as part of this major expansion. My initial responsibilities were to support fermentation manufacturing to replace the previous fermentation engineer who was working on the expansion project. In this role, I provided production support for the multiple fermentation processes at the plant and was also part of the technology transfer teams that transferred a new α-amylase and a lipase into manufacturing at the Franklinton plant. I was also responsible for production scheduling of the fermentation plant.
Process Automation
As an experienced BASIC programmer, I quickly became responsible for maintaining the programming of the old Foxboro FOX 3 process computer that was running three of our fermentors. This included verifying that it would keep working through Y2K. As the expansion design continued, I became involved by participating in drawing reviews and worked closely with the process automation engineers to develop the fermentation recipe structure for the new SattLine Distributed Control System (DCS). This was before the ISA-88 batch processing standard had been implemented by DCS manufacturers and we were adapting continuous process control systems to a batch environment. We developed a flexible recipe structure that provided for time profiles of all of the major process parameters, including temperature, agitation, aeration, pH and nutrient feed flow rates. I used this same structure when I developed the functional control specifications for the Valent BioSystems biopesticides fermentation plant many years later.
Startup Support
Along with the entire rest of the plant, I was heavily involved in the plant startup and spent many long days and nights in the plant working with the automation engineers to refine and debug the automation design. I also developed standard and emergency operating procedures and participated in the instrumentation and controls loop tests and water and sterility batch trials before we finally ran our first batches of product.