What does "scaling up products" mean?

Question

I am working on a chemistry project which consists of creating a product. My teacher said to us that we must research "how products are scaled up. Note that there is usually not a one to one ration in scaling up products and there has to be several trials." What does this mean?

Answer 1

"Scaling up" a project or a product means that you go from a small test sample to a larger production sample. For example, if you can mix sugar, absorbic acid and water together in a beaker, you can make a tasty synthetic "Tang" orange drink. However, if you want to make an industrial sized tank full of the stuff, you need to test by scaling up. Will you need more absorbic acid due to dealing with larger quantities? What will the sugar do when you're dealing with a 1,000 pounds at one time? The idea is that you are going to deal with a new set of issues/problems that don't exist in the lab on a small scale and will only manifest themselves once you go larger.