Agro Fine Chemicals

Fine Chemicals The Industry and the Business, by Peter Poliak Copyright 2007 by John Wiley Sons, Inc. 

Category Gronp Application Rate Gronp Application Rate  

On the other hand, generic agrochemicals continue to gain ground in Asia Pacific and South American countries. 

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The attractiveness of specific product categories, as discussed in the previous section, by and large defines the attractiveness of target markets as well. Besides its absolute size, the pharmaceuticals market comes first, because of its inherent elevated added value, the relatively high innovation rate, which leads to a steady demand for new products and for a manageable number of customers. The attributes for the agro fine chemicals market are similar, albeit less pronounced, specialty chemicals, in contrast, are needed by almost all industries and, therefore, virtually cannot be approached proactively. Also, the innovation rate in terms of new chemical entities is generally rather low, except in the electronic industry. 

Green fibres like flax, jute, sisal, kenaf and fibres of allied plants, which have been used for more than 8000 years, are the present and will be the future raw materials not only for the textile industry but also for modern eco-friendly composites used in different areas of application like building materials, particle boards, insulation boards, food, fodder and nourishment, friendly cosmetics, medicine and source for other bio-polymers agro-fine chemicals and energy . Potentially, under optimum cultivation conditions, they cause little or no detrimental effect on the ecosystem, they can grow in different climatic zones and they recycle the carbon dioxide in the Earth s atmosphere. 

Aero Agro Chemical hidustries Ltd., 168 AERO , calcium cyanide, 9 Aerojet Fine Chemicals, 215, 229 AEROPHINE , phosphine, 9 AEROTHENE MM , methylene chloride, 9 AFFLAIR , luster pigments, 9 Aflatoxins, 9... 

Organic compound production (fine chemical Organic acid production (China) (agro Organic acid recovery (Germany)... 

It has been noted, especially since the thalidomide tragedy, that different chemical enantiomers can induce very different biochemical responses. The production of enantiomerically-pure compounds is critical to the pharmaceutical, agro-chemical and fine-chemical industries, and has fueled the need for enantioselective heterogeneous catalysis [1]. 

Whereas biocatalysis previously was a last option that was only looked into when all other synthetic methods had failed, it is now a discipline well integrated into classical organic synthesis in the pharma-, agro-, and fine chemical industries [2]. An example from the latter group is laboratory chemicals producer Fluka, which has reported over 100 biocatalytic processes in routine production [3]. Biocatalysis can offer outstanding chemo-, regio- and/or enantioselectivities under mild reaction conditions. It is, hence, often used to create chirality, for example, in the pharma industry [4]. 

PTC finds its widest applications in the synthesis of intermediates in the fine chemicals(agro-chemicals, pharmaceutical, dyes, paper, and so on) industries (Lindbloom and Blander, 1980 Reuben and Sjoberg, 1981 Freedman, 1986 Starks, 1990 Sharma, 1997). We summarize some typical representative industrially important reactions in Table 5. It should be noted that it is not our intention to review the hundreds of articles that report the use of PTC in industrially important reactions, and these are only illustrative examples. 

Catalysis refers to the phenomenon by which the rate of a chemical reaction is accelerated by a snbstance (the catalyst) not appreciably consnmed in the process. The term catalysis was coined by Berzelins in 1835 and scientifically defined by Ostwald in 1895, but applications based on catalysis can be traced back to thousands of years ago with the discovery of fermentation to produce wine and beer. Nowadays, catalysts are used in 80% of all chemical industrial processes, and create annual global sales of about 1500 billion dollars and contribute directly or indirectly to approximately 35% of the world s GDP. Catalysis is central to a myriad of applications, including the manufacture of commodity, fine, specialty, petro-, and agro- chemicals as well as the production of pharmaceuticals, cosmetics, foods, and polymers. Catalysis is also an important component in new processes for the generation of clean energy, and in the protection of the enviromnent both by abating environmental pollutants and by providing alternative cleaner chemical synthetic procedures. 

The development of the process has been closely associated with the dairy industry. The use of spray drying in the dairy industry dates back to around 1800, but it was not until 1850 that it became possible to dry milk on industrial scale. Since then, this technology has been developed and expanded to cover a large food group which is now successfully spray dried. Over 20,000 spray dryers are estimated to be in use commercially, at present, to agro-chemical products, biotechnology products, fine and heavy chemicals, dairy products, foods, dyestuffs, mineral concentrates, and pharmaceuticals in evaporation capacities ranging from a few kg per hour to 50 tons/h (Mujumdar 2000). 

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