Chemstrand

Chemstrand Research Center, Inc., Durham, North Carolina. 

Present address, Chemstrand Research Center, Durham, N. C. 

Acrylonitrile is made from ethylene oxide by combining it with hydrogen cyanide and dehydrating the resultant cyanohydrin. Acrylonitrile is now used mostly for nitrile rubber. The new synthetic fibers Orion, Dynel, and Chemstrand will be large consumers of acrylonitrile. However, a large part of the expanded output of this derivative may come from the addition of hydrogen cyanide to acetylene. 

Barriers to entry into the pseudocommodity business include all the barriers for commodities plus the all-important customer know-how. Lack of technical expertise and patent protection can be formidable barriers to potential producers of a pseudocommodity. Du Pont was the sole producer of nylon from 1939 to 1951. Barriers to entry were removed under threat of government antitrust action in 1951, with the licensing of Chemstrand, which later became part of Monsanto. Since then a number of companies have entered the nylon business. Technical know-how and patent protection played a major role in both high- and low-pressure polyethylene manufacture in the years shortly after World War II. ICI developed polyethylene, but Union Carbide had a superior high-pressure process. Ziegler, Du Pont, and Phillips Petroleum all developed low-pressure processes, which they subsequently licensed to other manufacturers. Many pseudocommodities eventually become commodities by the diffusion of technology, standardization of the product, and the entry of many firms into the business. 

Acrilan . A brand of acrylic fibar, a copolymer of acrylonitrile and of a minor constituent with mildly basic character- Prepn of such copolymers Mo wry, Craig, U.S. pat. 2,744,086 and Craig, U-S. pat. 2,749,325 (both 1956 to Chemstrand). Review R. W. Moncrieff, Man-Made Fibres (John Wiley Sons, New York, 4th ed.. 1963) pp 471-482. 

The situation changed dramatically when DuPont introduced the first commercial acrylic fiber under the trade name of Orion. This commercial development took place shortly after DuPont [12] and I.G. Farbenindustrie [13] simultaneously reported solvents suitable for spinning acrylonitrile fibers in 1942. Based on this solvent breakthrough, DuPont was able to develop a commercial process for producing acrylic fibers. The DuPont process was based on dry spinning with A,A-dimethylformamide (DMF) as the solvent. The product was introduced in 1944 as Orion. Shortly thereafter Chemstrand (later to become Monsanto Fibers and Intermediates Company) introduced Acrilan, Siiddeutsche Chemiefaser (Hoechst) introduced Dolan, and Bayer introduced Dralon. Developments in this fledgling industry occurred rapidly from that time on. 

Chemstrand s Acrilan process was based on a wet-spinning technology, which produces a fibrillar microstructure. As a result, early acrylic fiber products suffered from problems with abrasion originating with a lack of coherence in the fibrillar surface of the fibers. This was overcome by adding a steam-annealing step, which, combined with the presence of vinyl acetate as comonomer, makes the fibrils that compose each filament fuse together. 

In the last analysis, the choice of topics has been dictated by my own taste and experience as well as by the needs of many hundreds of chemists and chemical engineers on the campuses of Princeton, Berkeley and Stanford to whom a course now crystallized in this book has been presented over the past eight years at the undergraduate and graduate level. The material has also been tried in accelerated courses of one or two weeks at Humble Oil and Refining Company, Esso Research and Engineering Company and The Chemstrand Corporation. 

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