Chemical industry milestones

The process developed by Asahi Chemical Industry in Japan [110], and performed in a tetraphasic system combining gas, oil, water and ruthenium particles with an average diameter of 20 nm, is a significant milestone in this area. The selectivity is very high and a yield of 60% in cyclohexene is obtained with this bulk ruthenium catalyst in the presence of zinc as co-catalyst at 150 °C and under 50.4 bar of H2. The cyclohexene produced by this process is used as a feedstock for caprolactam. 

S. Garfield, Mauve How One Man Changed the World, Faber Faber, London, 2000. A.S. Travis, in Milestones in ISO years of the Chemical Industry, P.J.T. Morris, W.A. Campbell and H.L. Roberts (Eds.), Royal Society of Chemistry, Cambridge, 1991. 

Travis, Anthony S. (1991). Synthetic Dyestuffe Modern Colours for the Modern World. In Milestones in 150 Years of the Chemical Industry, ed. P. J. T. Morris, W. A. Campbell, and H. L. Roberts. London Royal Society of Chemistry, pp. 144-15 7. 

The American Chemical Society (ACS) Division of Industrial and Engineering Chemistry, Inc. (I EC) celebrates the centennial of its establishment in 1908.1 EC was the first technical division established within ACS, and this volume is part of the commemorations marking this significant milestone at the 2008 New Orleans and Philadelphia National Meetings. The theme of the book is innovation and creativity in the chemical industry and related sectors, where industrial chemists and chemical engineers have made and are continuing to make major contributions. 

Selected milestones and trends in the modern chemical industry. 

From this beginning there has evolved a series of texts surpassing by far the scope and longevity envisioned by the founding Editorial Board. The McGraw-Hill Series in Chemical Engineering stands as a unique historical record of the development of chemical engineering education and practice. In the series one finds the milestones of the subject s evolution industrial chemistry, stoichiometry, unit operations and processes, thermodynamics, kinetics, and transfer operations. 

In 2004, a conceptual milestone was set by the US Department of Energy by identifying from a list of 300 candidates the top sugar-derived building blocks (Figure 9.17) [95]. These bioplatform chemicals have the potential to be converted into several chemicals and materials by chemical transformations, and it is evident that catalytic oxidation may play an important role for the full industrial utilization of these building blocks. 

This workshop focused on factors such as work processes, systems, and technologies that could enable and accelerate the pace of innovation and increase the yield of major innovations from work in the basic chemical sciences. More specifically, speakers identified teamwork, commitment, standardized portfolio management, clear goals, well-defined milestones, and effective technology transfer as some of the characteristics of innovative institutions and practices. Successful approaches to innovation have taken place in different environments and between different environments—despite infrastmcture and cultural differences, both interdisciplinary collaborations and collaborations between industry and academia have proven beneficial for all parties. Funding must also be available to promote innovation at stages of research often ignored. 

The discovery that chiral Lewis acids can catalyze the asymmetric Diels-Alder reaction is a major milestone for the scale up and practice of this reaction on an industrial scale. The use of such a catalyst obviates the need for a chiral auxiliary on the diene or dienophile. The vast majority of chiral auxiliaries that have been used in the Diels-Alder reaction are either not commercially available or are expensive. In addition, the chemical steps needed to attach and remove the chiral auxiliary increase the cost and complexity of the synthesis. Chiral catalysts may also be recovered or recycled, further decreasing cost.47 Research in this area is very active, and catalysts based on a number of metals (Table 26.1) have shown encouraging asymmetric induction.21 Our understanding of the role these catalysts play in the asymmetric induction of Diels-Alder reactions is increasing, and more general reagents should appear. 27-48 54... 

The 7th international symposium on Chemical Reaction Engineering represents another milestone in the advancement of the art and science of the chemical reactor. Forty-six contributed papers are presented here nineteen from Western Europe, five from Asia and Australia, one from Canada, and twenty-one from the United States. The Symposium continues to be dominated by university professors—only six papers have one or more coauthors from industry. If chemical reaction engineering is to serve industry, strong messages from industry are needed in the future. A bridge cannot give good service if there is a massive pier on one shore and a flimsy one on the other. 

The discovery of homogeneous metallocene catalysts in the 1980s was a very important milestone in polymer technology. With these catalysts the plastic industry is poised to move into an era of an entirely new range of polymeric materials with several specific advantages. From the initial discovery in the 1980s, close to five billion dollars is estimated to have been invested by several large chemical companies in research and development. In a relatively short time, this has resulted in approximately fifteen hundred patent applications Close to 0.5 million tons of metallocene-catalyzed polypropylene is expected to be manufactured by the year 2003. 

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