Proposal of an Innovative Environment for Supporting Production Scale-up, Including Design, Prototyping, Manufacturing, Assembly, Testing, and Certification of Products that Require Special Conditions

摘要

A considerable bottleneck in Brazil is the lack of technology centers aimed at industrial R&D. On one side, universities conduct basic research that is usually does not go beyond bench testing. On the other side, companies have their structure focused on large-scale production. Pilot plants, which are fundamental environments for the innovation process, are rarely found within Brazilian companies. This paper proposes a model for an innovative infrastructure, focused on meeting industrial demands that require special conditions of operation and control. Its scope is limited to supporting innovation mainly in the pre-competitive stage of product and process development. To this effect, the proposed model consists of a technology service center, embedded in an industrial environment, which focuses on production scale-up, large scale testing, manufacturing/assembly of pilot plants, and development of real size prototypes. Through these activities, this center is expected to give full support to technological development and to industrial innovation processes. In order to validate this proposal, an environment was modeled for the development of renewable energy solutions, which encompasses scale-up, testing and certification.