Chemical process industry production sequence

Industrial chemical processes are determined by recipe and production route. The recipe is the specification of a sequence of processing steps for the transformation of raw materials into the desired product(s). Specifications include quantity and quality of raw materials, composition of feeds, sequence of additions to the reaction zone, rate of dosing, temperature-time dependencies, pressures, etc. The production route also includes the specification of equipment in which processing steps are performed. 

In processes involving whole cells the required product can often be formed in a single step, although the cells essentially carry out a multi-step synthesis. This means that only a single product purification is necessary. Conversely, in chemical synthesis of compounds, each step in the synthesis is usually carried out separately. Thus the product of one reaction must often be purified before it can be used in the next step in the synthetic sequence. This multi-step approach is expensive, time consuming and can require a complex process plant to handle the individual steps on an industrial scale. 

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