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Industrial crystallisation — from doctorate to plant floor.
Crystallisation is one of the few unit operations where product quality is decided at the micrometre scale, and where one wrong parameter costs you the yield, the filtration time and the whole batch. This is what we know properly.
01Background
Who you are talking to
A doctorate in industrial crystallisation, followed by working experience in the oil and gas industry. That is an unusual pairing: crystallisation is taught as an academic subject, but few people who know the theory have stood next to a crystalliser fouling shut at two in the morning.
The field is narrow in name and broad in practice. Crystallisation, precipitation and solution-phase transitions turn up everywhere — fertiliser production, battery materials, pharmaceuticals, water treatment, mineral processing, and deposits in oil and gas production. We cover most of that spectrum.
02Symptoms
Recognise any of these?
These are the problems that make people call us. All of them are symptoms of a crystallisation step that is not under control.
- Crystals too small. Filtration takes three times as long as it should and drying falls behind.
- Product cakes. It clumps in the bag or silo after a few weeks and the customer complains.
- Wrong polymorph, or several at once. Batches behave differently and nobody can point to why.
- The crystalliser fouls. Encrustation on walls and cooling surfaces forces washouts and downtime.
- Yield too low. Too much product stays in the mother liquor and recycling builds up impurities.
- Batch-to-batch variation. Same recipe, different result. No one knows which variable is driving it.
- Scale-up failed. What worked in the lab behaves completely differently at production scale.
- Deposits in the process train. Scale, wax or salt precipitating where it should not.
The common thread is almost always the same: supersaturation is not controlled, it just happens. Nucleation and growth compete for the same material, and which one wins determines the entire particle size distribution downstream.
03Areas
Areas
The core: crystallisation and precipitation
- Solubility curves, metastable zone width and supersaturation control
- Nucleation and crystal growth — kinetics, competition, control
- Cooling, evaporative, antisolvent and reactive crystallisation
- Seeding strategy: when, how much, what size
- Polymorphism, solvates and hydrates — control and characterisation
- Agglomeration, breakage and particle size distribution (PSD/CSD)
- Population balance modelling and MSMPR analysis
- Batch versus continuous operation — and when switching actually pays
- Downstream: filtration, washing, drying, caking and storage stability
- PAT and in-line measurement — FBRM, Raman, ATR-FTIR, turbidity
- Scale-up from lab to pilot to plant
Oil, gas and the process industry
Broader process work, built on years in the industry. When something deposits, scales or separates badly, the physics is usually the same.
- Deposits, scaling and solids in production and process systems
- Process troubleshooting: finding what actually drives the problem
- Technical review of designs and vendor proposals
Adjacent industries
The same physics turns up in fertiliser, battery materials, pharmaceuticals, water treatment, mineral processing and CO₂ capture.
04Deliverables
What you actually get
- Diagnosis
- What is actually driving the problem, from operating data, samples and physics — not guesswork
- Phase basis
- Solubility curve, metastable zone and operating window for your system
- Operating recipe
- Cooling profile, seeding strategy, agitation and residence time — quantified
- Model
- Population balance or mass balance where the problem calls for it
- Experimental programme
- Which lab experiments will actually answer the question, and which are wasted
- Scale-up basis
- What scales, what does not, and where the risk sits
- Second opinion
- Independent review of a vendor proposal before you sign
05The tool
And the tool, if you need it
Consulting is the main service. But we are also developers, which gives us an option most consultancies do not have: when a review reveals the calculation lives in a spreadsheet inherited through three generations of staff, we can build the tool that does it properly.
- Calculation tools for solubility, mass and energy balance — with traceability and version control
- Simulation of cooling and dosing profiles
- Dashboards consolidating PAT and process data into one view
- Automated report generation from measurement data
- Small internal applications replacing repetitive manual work
This is an add-on, not a package you have to buy. Most engagements are consulting only.
Engagement and pricing
Bounded assignments — a diagnosis, a second opinion, an experimental programme — are fixed price agreed up front. Longer engagements run on an agreed day rate. We work in Norwegian and English.
Send a short description of the problem and we will tell you honestly whether we are the right fit. If we are not, we will say so immediately.
Questions
We do not have crystallisation in our process. Is this relevant?
Possibly more than you think. If you have deposits, precipitation, caking, unexpected solids in a liquid stream or filters blinding, you have crystallisation — you just call it something else.
Do you need to visit the plant?
Often we get far with operating data, samples and a couple of video calls. For problems involving geometry, agitation or encrustation, a visit is usually worth it.
Do you have your own laboratory?
No. We design the experimental programme and interpret the results, working with laboratories or using yours when experiments are needed.
What about confidentiality?
We sign an NDA before seeing anything. That is standard and we expect it.
In short
- PhD in industrial crystallisation
- Working experience in oil and gas
- Diagnosis, not generic reports
- Can build the tool as well
- Fixed price or agreed day rate
- NDA before we see anything
06Beyond advice
From advice to tools and training.
The same knowledge that goes into a diagnosis can be delivered as a calculation tool your team uses every day, or as training video that shows operators what actually happens in the crystalliser.
Tell us what is not behaving.
Two paragraphs is enough. We reply with what we think is driving it and what it would take to find out for certain — usually within two business days.