Commodity Applications

After many decades of application, industry has completely accepted standard NDT as an inevitable but invaluable part of production and maintenance of components. Its application has been well-regulated, acceptance criteria for weld defects exist, good schemes for personnel qualification are in place and equipment has evolved to a standard of nearperfection. NDT has become a commodity. Pioneering years are over. 

Applications Research. Specialty chemical producers devote a larger share of their time and costs to appHcations research than do producers of most commodity chemicals. As noted earHer, the most successful specialty chemical producers have been those companies that ate able to respond quickly to customer needs and problems under the conditions found in the customer s plant. This entails having, at the specialty chemical plant, equipment and procedural knowledge which closely approximate those found among customers. Tests can then be mn and a solution to the problem or need may result. If successful, even in part, it can be brought to the customers and tried there. In practice, of course, each customer s plant has some variables which make a single answer or product quite unlikely. Fortunately, slight modifications by the suppHer will often solve the next customer s problem. 

Approved techniques for manual and mechanical sampling are often documented for various commodities handled in commerce by industiy groups. Examples are the International Standards Organization (ISO), British Standards Association (BSA), Japan Institute of Standards (JIS), American Society for Testing Materi s (ASTM), and the Fertihzer Institute. Sampling standards developed for use in specified industry applications frequently include instructions for labora-toiy work in sample preparation and analysis—steps (2) and (3) above. 

ORM-D—A material such as a consumer commodity which, though otherwise subject to the regulations of this subchapter, presents a limited hazard during transportation due to its form, quantity and packaging. They must be materials for which exceptions are provided in Sec. 172.101. A shipping description applicable to each ORM-D material or category of ORM-D materials is found in Sec. 172-101. (Sec. 173.500 (a)(4))... 

Although very efficient, the broad application of the direct preparation is restricted due to the limited number of pure starting enantiomers. The design of a multistep process that includes asymmetric synthesis is cumbersome and the development costs may be quite high. This approach is likely best suited for the multi-ton scale production of commodity enantiomers such as the drugs ibuprofen, naproxen, atenolol, and albuterol. However, even the best asymmetric syntheses do not lead to products in an enantiomerically pure state (100 % enantiomeric excess). Typically, the product is enriched to a certain degree with one enantiomer. Therefore, an additional purification step may be needed to achieve the required enantiopurity. 

Another method of reducing the quantity of plastics that has been used in certain products is to use engineered plastics with higher performance than the lower-cost commodity plastics. When applicable, this approach permits using less material to compensate for its higher cost. With a thinner-walled construction there could also be additional cost savings, since less processing heat, pressure, and time cycle is required. 

Nowadays, a strategic area of research is the development of polymers based on carbohydrates due to the worldwide focus on sustainable materials. Since the necessary multi-step synthesis of carbohydrate-based polymers is not economical for the production of commodity plastics, functionalization of synthetic polymers by carbohydrates has become a current subject of research. This aims to prepare new bioactive and biocompatible polymers capable of exerting a temporary therapeutic function. The large variety of methods of anchoring carbohydrates onto polymers as well as the current and potential applications of the functionalized polymers has been discussed recently in a critical review [171]. Of importance is that such modification renders not only functionality but also biodegradability to the synthetic polymers. 

There is some similarity between the cracking of petroleum and the cracking of biomass. However, biomass is more complex chemically both in terms of structrual types and functional groups. In petrochemistry, hydrocarbons are fractionated and they are then functionalized by oxidation, halogenation, nitration and other chemical processes so as to add value. The commodity chemicals are then built up into more complex molecules using such popular synthetic methods as Friedel Craft reactions, Michael and aldol condensations, and Heck and Suzuki couplings. The speciality products of these reactions are then further elaborated into formulations for use in everyday applications ranging from personal care... 

In this context, the list of commonly available techniques and the list of obsolete dangerous reagents must be revised regularly. Furthermore, questions which are asked frequently by applicants should be responded to, e.g., lists of commodities for the four crop groups and extent of data for confirmation techniques. 

If analytical methods are validated in inter-laboratory validation studies, documentation should follow the requirements of the harmonized protocol of lUPAC. " However, multi-matrix/multi-residue methods are applicable to hundreds of pesticides in dozens of commodities and have to be validated at several concentration levels. Any complete documentation of validation results is impossible in that case. Some performance characteristics, e.g., the specificity of analyte detection, an appropriate calibration range and sufficient detection sensitivity, are prerequisites for the determination of acceptable trueness and precision and their publication is less important. The LOD and LOQ depend on special instmmentation, analysts involved, time, batches of chemicals, etc., and cannot easily be reproduced. Therefore, these characteristics are less important. A practical, frequently applied alternative is the publication only of trueness (most often in terms of recovery) and precision for each analyte at each level. No consensus seems to exist as to whether these analyte-parameter sets should be documented, e.g., separately for each commodity or accumulated for all experiments done with the same analyte. In the latter case, the applicability of methods with regard to commodities can be documented in separate tables without performance characteristics. 

Since one of the key purposes of this study is to determine residue partitioning in the various processed commodities, every reasonable effort must be made to start the processing procedures with some level of residue in the RAC. If the RAC has residues present at harvest under normal GAP, then selective partitioning can be easily detected as the RAC is processed. However, if there is no residue in/on the RAC, the guideline indicates that exaggerated application rates may be required to obtain sufficient residue level to conduct a successful processing study. Usually a three- or... 

Pesticide residues consist of chemicals that might occur in a commodity as a result of application of a pesticide. Such chemicals typically correspond to compounds for which a regulatory agency has or will set a tolerance, i.e., a maximum residue limit, specific to the commodity. In either a field study or a market basket survey, residues to be determined will be those which result from application of the specific pesticide that the study is intended to support. A market basket survey, however, might be intended to support not just one but several different pesticides of the same or different chemical classes. In addition, a market basket survey might include pesticides not used in the USA but for which import tolerances exist. For example, some uses of the parathion family of pesticides on food products have been abandoned in the USA but remain in other countries that export the products to the USA. A market basket survey offers a means to evaluate actual dietary exposures to residues of such pesticides. In addition, tolerance expressions frequently include multiple compounds, all of which must typically be determined in residue field trials. The sponsor of the market basket survey must decide whether to analyze for all compounds in the applicable tolerance expression or to restrict the program to selected analytes, such as the active ingredient. 

In a field residue study, commodities are grown on control plots located near the plots used to produce commodities treated with test substance. Care is taken to ensure that the only difference between control and treated commodities is that the former does not receive application of the pesticide and the latter does. Crop variety and growing conditions (including geographical location, soil, time of year, weather, etc.) are essentially identical for the control and the treated commodities. 

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