Aids to Productivity

Chemical researchers can boost their own productivity by seeking and accepting the many valuable services that pharmaceutical companies offer them. Expert information scientists search the literature using computers, combing much of Chemical Abstracts or Beilstein to learn how to make or where to buy needed compounds. 

Analytical services are also available, sind exploiting them fully can increase a chemist s output. He need not record any but urgent spectra, leaving the spectroscopists to acquire routine or technically difficult ones. The chemist thereby fi ees himself to carry out reactions for which he would otherwise find less time or meet some delay. By contrast, industrial spectros- 

Soon after you begin work, your mailboxes wih overflow. Mail demands judicious treatment since not all of it offers value to you. Merely reading the subject of an e-mail message and its sender s address is a helpful guide to purging your electronic in-basket. To throw away worthless, hard-copy items without ever bringing them to your desk saves time otherwise, you needlessly handle the material twice. The losses count little in a day or week, but mount over a working lifetime. 

In some companies, cumulative time losses come not from what researchers receive but from what they send. Chemists repeatedly complete several different kinds of forms to order supplies, register compounds, or obtain in-house spectra. Some forms require information that changes infrequently, like a chemist s name or an internal compmy mailing address. Using photocopies of such a form can conserve time, if the copies already bear the repetitive data. To take another example, printing a chemist s name saves writing it on the labels used for vials containing compound samples. In other companies, however, researchers make some of these submissions electronically, which saves time. Computer applications fill in the repetitive information. 

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Fingerprint analysis a direct-injection GC/FID analysis in which the detector output—the chromatogram—is compared to chromatograms of reference materials as an aid to product identification. 

AID TO PRODUCTION OF PROTEINS Gene isolation Gene synthesis DNA sequencing... 

Preformulation as an Aid to Product Design in Early Drug Development... 

The cleaning down of equipment and related treatments can employ a wide range of agents. Components and other aids to production should usually be treated with alcohol-based preparations, which enable rapid evaporation of the solvent of such disinfectant agents and therefore facilitates a smooth, responsive work flow during production. 

The use of factice as a process aid for rubber compounds dates back to the early days of the industry, when it was discovered that various vegetable and fish oils could be crosslinked by sulphur just as rubber could. The history of the factice industry is described as part of the proceedings of a s3miposium entitled Factice as an Aid to Productivity in the Rubber Industry and the subject is historically discussed by R. F. Reynolds. ... 

Factice as an Aid to Productivity in the Rubber Industry, Proc. Nat Coll Rubber TechnoL, London, 1962, p. 5. 

This cleavage reaction is more often seen in structural analysis than in synthesis The substitution pattern around a dou ble bond is revealed by identifying the carbonyl containing compounds that make up the product Hydrolysis of the ozonide intermediate in the presence of zinc (reductive workup) permits aide hyde products to be isolated without further oxidation... 

Raw Materials. PVC is inherently a hard and brittle material and very sensitive to heat it thus must be modified with a variety of plasticizers, stabilizers, and other processing aids to form heat-stable flexible or semiflexible products or with lesser amounts of these processing aids for the manufacture of rigid products (see Vinyl polymers, vinyl chloride polymers). Plasticizer levels used to produce the desired softness and flexibihty in a finished product vary between 25 parts per hundred (pph) parts of PVC for flooring products to about 80—100 pph for apparel products (245). Numerous plasticizers (qv) are commercially available for PVC, although dioctyl phthalate (DOP) is by far the most widely used in industrial appHcations due to its excellent properties and low cost. For example, phosphates provide improved flame resistance, adipate esters enhance low temperature flexibihty, polymeric plasticizers such as glycol adipates and azelates improve the migration resistance, and phthalate esters provide compatibiUty and flexibihty (245). 

More specifically, data bases are now available which are designed as aids to plastics material selection. One estimate in 1993 was that there were 300-400 systems in the field.Systems vary as to whether they are limited to the products of a particular company, to a particular area of activity and to the depth of coverage over a broad area. 

A major disadvantage of this system is the limitation of the single-pass gas-chlorination phase. Unless increased pressure is used, this equipment is unable to achieve higher concentrations of chlorine as an aid to a more complete and controllable reaction with the chlorite ion. The French have developed a variation of this process using a multiple-pass enrichment loop on the chlorinator to achieve a much higher concentration of chlorine and thereby quickly attain the optimum pH for maximum conversion to chlorine dioxide. By using a multiple-pass recirculation system, the chlorine solution concentrates to a level of 5-6 g/1. At this concentration, the pH of the solution reduces to 3.0 and thereby provides the low pH level necessary for efficient chlorine dioxide production. A single pass results in a chlorine concentration in water of about 1 g/1, which produces a pH of 4 to 5. If sodium chlorite solution is added at this pH, only about 60 percent yield of chlorine dioxide is achieved. The remainder is unreacted chlorine (in solution) and... 

Batch crystallizers are widely used in the chemical and allied industries, solar saltpans of ancient China being perhaps the earliest recorded examples. Nowadays, they still comprise relatively simple vessels, but are usually (though not always) provided with some means of agitation and often have artificial aids to heat exchange or evaporation. Batch crystallizers are generally quite labour intensive so are preferred for production rates of up to say 10 000 tonnes per year, above which continuous operation often becomes more favourable. Nevertheless, batch crystallizers are very commonly the vessel of choice or availability in such duties as the manufacture of fine chemicals, pharmaceutical components and speciality products. 

To complicate matters, a government program to assist investment in minerals will not necessarily slow depletion. Investment aid, to be sure, encourages depletion-reducing investment in delaying production. However, the aid also stimulates depletion-increasing investments in production facilities. Which effect predominates depends on the circumstances. Depletion retardation is more likely for producers with presently large excesses of price over cost. Depletion stimulation is more likely when prices are close to costs. 

NOTE All boiler plant operators are urged to meter the MU water consumption as an aid to calculating a material balance. Steam generation rates can be reasonably accurately determined from the fuel consumption because records of fuel costs are always maintained. Daily and weekly BD rates usually can be estimated from the use of a measuring bucket or pipe velocity table. The difference between steam production and MU represents a combination ofBD and loss of CR. 

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