Brunner-Mond process

Ammonia or its salts are employed in a variety of ways in many trades. From it nitric acid, the vital necessity for the manufacture of all high explosives, can be made it is an essential for the Brunner Mond or Solvay ammonia soda process for the production of alkali in the liquid form it is employed all over the world in refrigerating machinery, but its enormous and increasing use is in agfriculture, where, in the form of sulphate of ammonia, it constitutes one of, if not the most important chemical manures known to man. During the year 1916 350,000 tons of ammonium sulphate were produced in this country, the larger proportion of which was consumed in agriculture—a proportion likely to increase and not diminish if the demand for home production of food continues. 

Brunner, Mond Co. announced in May 1921 (evidently without prior negotiations with BASF) that it had obtained from the British government a license under the Treaty to use confiscated BASF patents to make synthetic ammonia. Bosch complained to Walther Rathenau, Minister for Reconstruction, but he could offer no help. Even so, the British could only get the process to work, in 1923, with information purchased from Alsatian engineers who had worked in Germany during the war. ... 

ICI (Imperial Chemical Industries). Formed in 1926 by the amalgamation of four major chemical companies, including British Dyestuffs (Kollewe and Wearden, 2007). Two of the other organizations, Brunner Mond and United Alkali, already produced alkalis used as basic components for many chemical processes, particularly washing and dyeing textiles. The last of the four companies, Nobel Industries was founded by Alfred Nobel (of the Nobel Peace Prize) and manufactured explosives. 

In Britain, well-established firms such as United Alkali and Brunner, Mond failed to use these new electrolytic methods. A completely new enterprise, Castner-Kellner Alkali Co. Ltd., founded in 1895, pursued the electrochemical path. Castner was an American, Kellner an Austrian inventor. They sold their products to the British Aluminium Company, and to Solvay. Castner-Kellner acquired rights to electrochemical processes, and was financed by British capital. By 1914 it had grown to become a medium-sized enterprise. Despite this, the view that [a] particular strength of the British lay in alkali production and in the production of caustic soda by an electrical processhas little or no foundation. 

Brunner, Mond Co., the British operator of the Solvay process and the main competitor to UAC, presents a different picture. It was established in 1873 at Northwich in Cheshire. In the early years of the firm s existence its operational side was heavily focused on the founder, Ludwig Mond. As the firm grew, several analytical laboratories were established, and it seems to have been common practice... 

These two firms have both common and distinguishing features. The route for chemists into process management through analytical chemistry is the major similarity and in both firms it was the central mechanism of promotion. In UAC the institutionalization of research and the development of a bureaucratized employment structure was faster. However, Brunner, Mond was much the more successful of the two firms. While there are technical and commercial reasons for this, beyond the mechanisms for the deployment of trained chemists, it seems likely that the more flexible and responsive, and less formalized, systems at Brunner, Mond had some part to play. The UAC approach was related to the firm s complex structure, which was conditioned by the need to integrate the many companies from which it was formed. There are parallels with the kind of organizational structures identified by Chandler in the USA, though that of UAC was crude and driven by contingency. 

In 1918, the British government started work on a plant at Billingham in Yorkshire this plant was purchased in 1919 by Mond and Brunner, who developed the process and laid the foundations for the huge ICI complex at Billingham. Ammonia production began at Billingham in 1924. 

Ernest Solvay (Rebecq-Rognon, Brabant, i6 April 1838-Brussels, 26 May 192 ) patented his process in 1863 (BP 3131/11 December 1863) for the apparatus, the principal feature being the vertical carbonator, and started a works near Charleroi in 1865, the soda being shown in the Paris Exhibition in 1867. Ludwig Mond and John Brunner began to work the process in 1873 Northwich, Cheshire. Roscoe was instrumental in the adoption of H. Y. Castner s electrolytic process in Oldbury in 1892. ... 

Brunner, Sir John Tomlinson (1842-1919) A British chemical industrialist and parliamentarian who worked in partnership with the German-born chemist Ludwig Mond (1838-1909) to form the Bruimer Mond Co. Ltd chemical company. The company made alkali using the Solvay process. He was a 1st Baronet and twice served as a Liberal Member of Parliament for the constituency ofNorthwich, Cheshire. 

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