Chemical industry employment trends

The trend in the use of deep bed filters in water treatment is to eliminate conventional flocculators and sedimentation tanks, and to employ the filter as a flocculation reactor for direct filtration of low turbidity waters. The constraints of batch operation can be removed by using one of the available continuous filters which provide continuous backwashing of a portion of the medium. Such systems include moving bed filters, radial flow filters, or traveling backwash filters. Further development of continuous deep bed filters is likely. Besides clarification of Hquids, which is the most frequent use, deep bed filters can also be used to concentrate soflds into a much smaller volume of backwash, or even to wash the soflds by using a different Hquid for the backwash. Deep bed filtration has a much more limited use in the chemical industry than cake filtration (see Water, Industrial water treatment Water, Municipal WATERTREATiffiNT Water Water, pollution and Water, reuse). 

The individual self-contained volumes will each encompass a closely related field of applications and will demonstrate those methods which have found the widest applications in the area. The emphasis is expected to be on the comparison of published and established methods which have been employed in the application area rather than the details of experimental and novel methods. The volumes will also identify future trends and the potential impact of new technologies and new separation methods. The volumes will therefore provide up-to-date critical surveys of the roles that analytical separations play now and in the future in research, development and production, across the wide range of the fine and heavy chemical industry, pharmaceuticals, health care, food production and the environment. It will not be a laboratory guide but a source book of established and potential methods based on the literature that can be consulted by the reader. 

We have attempted in this chapter to consider some of the points and questions concerning current trends and their effects on the future of the CPI and on the chemical professionals employed by these industries. It is important to realize that many of the issues confronting society and the world have strong implications for the future well-being of the CPI and CPI employees. It is also important to realize that predicting the future is often futile, since trends can change suddenly, and surprises occur. 

Solid catalysts are widely used such as in the sulfuric acid, ammonia, fertilizer, petroleum, and petrochemical industries. The trend is to produce more organic chemicals by catalytic processes (usually employing solid catalysts). These catalysts can be classified in two ways. 

Secondly, over the last decade a considerable number of traditional chemical firms were broken up and replaced by so-called industrial parks. This poses a potential problem for verification under the CWC as the Convention s definitions that form the basis for the verification measures assume the existence of plant sites - which were prevalent in the late 1980s, when the CWC was negotiated. A good example of this trend is the evolution of the former Hoechst AG near Frankfurt, Germany, into an industrial park with more than 75 international life science and chemical companies, employing more than 22,000 people.51 In order to maintain an effective and efficient industry verification system under the CWC, developments like these have to be monitored closely, so as to be able to adapt the verification procedures to the changed environment. 

Three principal areas of interest are addressed in this book the chemical industry (excluding pharmaceuticals), the pharmaceutical industry, and the business situation inside China. Past, present, and future trends in the employment of chemical professionals are examined, as this affects most American Chemical Society (ACS) members directly. We hope the reader will find this review useful to understanding what is happening both to the chemical industry and to the people who work in it. 

A second major driving force for the use of alumina-based chemicals as selective adsorbents has been the cost of energy. In the petrochemical industry, for example, processes which have traditionally used distillation are employing adsorption as the primary operation for separation and purification. Figure 2 illustrates this trend. The purification of ethylene dichloride, a commodity feed material for the production of poljwinyl chloride, is produced by a process utilizing a selective alumina-based adsorbent. Trace chloride and iron contaminants are effectively removed to undetectable limits from the hquid without the need to change the process temperature nor volatilize any of the stream to effect the separation. 

Future hiring trends—directions in employment large numbers of retiring "baby boomers" will have to be replaced in the chemical processing industry. 

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