u/m_ukan

We're having a debate at work and I want some outside opinions.

An agrochemical company building a new plant. 9 lines, around 50 SKUs of pesticide formulations. Herbicides, fungicides, insecticides, seed treatments.

Critical: we do NOT synthesize any active ingredients. We buy them in and formulate. Unit ops are mixing, dissolving, wet bead milling, dispersion, emulsification, wet/dry granulation, drying, particle size control, filtration, and filling. No reactions, no distillation, no solvent recovery anywhere in the plant.

The disagreement: should we buy Aspen Plus or CHEMCAD licenses to design the lines?

My position: No. Aspen and CHEMCAD are built for synthesis, distillation, separations, and rigorous thermodynamics. None of that exists on this plant. The actual design problems are mechanical and empirical: bead mill scale-up, particle size control, dryer sizing, and so on. Pilot trials, Minitab DOE, AutoCAD Plant 3D, and a solid HAZOP process do more for us than Aspen would.

My colleague's position: Aspen is valuable because you can run sensitivity and Monte Carlo studies thousands of times to find rare failure modes that hand calculations would miss.

Has anyone here actually run a formulation-only plant or designed one? Did you need Aspen or CHEMCAD that context, or is it mostly synthesis-plant tooling that doesn't fit?

First apartment, first renovation. Can't tell anymore if this actually looks good or if I've just stared at it too long