Development of new products and new processes are critical in process industry. Its purpose is to improve our quality of life with affordable cost. This challenge also opens big opportunities to manufacturing companies by the competitive products.

Successful development can be realized by the combination of market needs and technical seeds owned by each manufacturer. The latter consists of basic chemical research, process development, process & plant designs and safe commercial production. Although every stage is a critical constituent to the success, constraints become tighter with the project progress; it has little cost impact if we change extraction to distillation as the purification means during basic research stage; however if we want to change extraction to distillation after the plant has been constructed, it has a tremendous negative impact on profitability.

PreFEED ia a critical stage to determine the feasibility of project
before conducting FEED（Front-End Engineering Design）

This fact urges us to put more focus on the early stage of development: basic research and process development. This is true not only for the big projects, but also for the smaller process improvements. They have similar stages to implement improvements: data acquisition by laboratory or plant (research), interpretation of data and consideration of improvement (development), modification of operation and plant (design).

With the increase of global competition it has become more difficult to introduce license from outside and it is becoming more common to develop its own technologies inside. Comparing to research and design stages, less attention was paid to process development (or production technology); not many companies have a dedicated department for process development. The core academic field to this area is chemical engineering.

PreFEED Corporation was established in 2005 with the following missions:

• To provide practical chemical engineering and related skills systematically which were gained only through job on the training in the past.
• To provide solutions to the process development and plant operation related problems through technical consultancy.
• To provide software environment which enables the engineers to build own models from simple ones to complex ones with the same easiness.

We are determined to support our clients strongly by the highly-skilled professionals.

Representative Director
Dr. Yoshio Kumagae