Chemists’ work process research

Many laboratory syntheses of important structural types of compounds are too long or complex to work well in manufacturing. Chemists working in the process area are thus often engaged in inventing new approaches that use the most modern reactions, in order to develop compact synthetic schemes with small numbers of acceptable steps. The modern reactions that make this possible are being invented by chemists involved in basic discovery and creation, usually in universities. The pressure on industrial process chemists to develop practical schemes for manufacturing important products means that they do not normally have the time for the basic research that can lead to new chemical reactions. 

A series which presents the current state of the art in chosen areas of oils and fats chemistiy, including its relevance to the food and pharmaceutical industries. Written at professional and reference level, it is directed at chemists and technologists working in oils and fats processing, the food industry, the oleo-chemicals industry and the pharmaceutical industry, at analytical chemists and quality assurance personnel, and at lipid chemists in academic research laboratories. Each volume in the series provides an accessible source of information on the science and technology of a particular area. 

As a food chemist, you might also work in an industrial setting in food quality management, processing, research and development, marketing and distribution. 

In the prenomination phase, the polymorphism screen will be limited due to the amount of compound available, and strategies must therefore be employed to reflect this situation. Initially, the Medicinal Chemistry batches should be analyzed to gain preliminary evidence for the propensity of the compound to show variations in the solid-state form of the compound. It is possible that the Process Research and Development department will also be working on the synthesis and crystallization of the compound. Therefore, a useful starting place for searching for polymorphs is to screen the material produced by the process chemists as they attempt to optimize the crystallization conditions. Work can also be undertaken by the Pharmaceutical and Analytical departments, in parallel, to use some of the above methods to generate polymorphs. However, these initial studies will probably have to be carried out on a micro- or semi-microscale. 

The author worked as a process research chemist for three years with Catalytica/DSM (Mountain View, CA) and then 2 years with Pharmacia/Pfizer (South San Francisco, CA) before joining Jacobs University (Bremen, Germany) as an assistant professor of organic chemistry in October 2003. E-mail address t.nugent jacobs-university.de. 

The purpose of this book is to highlight the importance of an area of research in the pharmaceutical industry known as process research and development and the challenges ahead. In the pharmaceutical industry, the medicinal chemist is faced with the daunting task of finding the next drug buster. This is by far the toughest job, because many medicinal chemists could work all their lives synthesizing molecules that may never make it to the market. 

In addition to process research positions, a variety of other jobs go to chemical developers. Some organic chemists work in kilo laboratories or pilot plants, while others labor in natural products, biocatalysis, or safety groups. Finally, anyone interested in chemical development work may consider temporary employment with a scientific staffing agency having fipcos among its clients (see text below). 

A rise in throughput and a fall in cost come from either of two increases in volume efficiency. Process researchers can decrease the solvent volume taken to work up the product mixture or reduce the amount of solvent used to run the reaction. For example, to obtain a certain phenylacetonitrile from 1 kilogram of the corresponding ben2yl chloride, Parke-Davis process chemists dissolve the chloride in only 1 liter of toluene (Dozeman et ai,... 

The conception of an idea may be originated by a chemical engineer, a chemist, a physicist, or any other person. It may be proved sound by the use of existing data, but frequently chemical research must be carried out to provide a more quantitative basis foe evaluating the economic feasibility of the process. In general, the object of process research is to find out by library survey and laboratory work if the product can be made and what the yields and rates of conversion are. 

This review aims to provide chemists working on porous materials with a basic understanding of XAS and related methods and to show them where the techniques might be of help in their research. After a short section on the basic physics of the interaction of X-rays with matter (Sect. 2), the basic physical processes and a theoretical description of XAFS are discussed (Sect. 3) in such a way that the method can be understood. Section 4 presents some experimental details and an example of a typical data analysis procedure. The next section is devoted an explanation of the type of information contained in X-ray absorption spectra by using examples from zeoHte chemistry (Sect. 5). Newer developments, especially with regard to time-resolved and in situ studies, as well as related techniques such as electron energy loss spectroscopy (EELS) and anomalous diffraction, are described in Sect. 6. 

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