Factory on a Sheet

Electronics before integrated circuits consisted of bulky units made from a variety of manufacturing methods placed in containers of mostly empty space connected by hand with a nest of wires. The chemical plants of today are similar, they consist of bulky unit processes made from a variety of manufacturing methods placed in sheds of mostly empty space connected by hand with a nest of pipes.

I define the term factory on a sheet (extending the concept of lab on a chip) to describe the novel process of integrating many fluid unit processes and sensors such as compressors, heat exchangers and valves together into one monolithic unit formed primarily from stacking laser cut and welded sheets that are 1.2m by 2.4m in size.

I have developed theoretical laser cut and welded designs for the most common fluid processing unit operations and sensors. Circuit boards can be mounted directly onto sheets and be connected via laser cut traces to sensors and actuators enabling orders of magnitude higher sexel resolution than is possible with conventional designs.

Simplifying and automating the manufacturing process will result in more cost effective and higher sexel resolution devices. This will shift the capital cost vs efficiency trade off enabling the economical manufacture of things like the Carnot heat pump where the working fluid will pass through one hundred heat exchanger and pressure exchanger pairs. This will enable air conditioners, kettles and similar to operate up to five times more energy efficiently. Conventionally, high temperature processes (like smelting steel) are energy expensive because the capital cost of heat exchangers is traded off against the energy efficiency of the process. Factory on a sheet plants won’t have to make that compromise and will be able to recycle all of the heat with negligible heat input required upon reaching steady state.

Land, capital cost and build time are significant parts of a chemical plant budget that will all be reduced by orders of magnitude thus factory on a sheet economics will likely be dominated by feedstock and product prices.

A recycling facility factory on a sheet can also be used to melt down the sheets from other factory on a sheet into the raw materials to make a new factory on a sheet. This means that if a plant is made with multiple process streams in parallel the least efficient process stream can be recycled into the latest open sourced design for that process stream. Thus the performance of the plant can be incrementally and continually improved as new technology is developed at minimal cost.

I feel like I am in the 1950’s trying to explain how much of a game changer the integrated circuit would be for electronics. The reality is if this works then factory on a sheet will become a key technology for the fourth industrial revolution and will bring about in the chemical processing world the exponential growth in improvements that the world of computers has experienced for half a century. Developing the research field of factory on a sheet is what I would like to be topic of my PhD but I require funding to do so.