Early Industrial Applications

Among the reactions mentioned before, the early industrial applications of TS-1 catalyst were the hydroxylation of phenol (lOOOOton/year) and the... 

All such processes suffer one disadvantage in that the capacity of the adsorbent for the adsorbate in question is limited. The adsorbent has to be removed at intervals from the process and regenerated, that is, restored to its original condition. For this reason, the adsorption unit was considered in early industrial applications to be more difficult to integrate with a continuous process than, say, a distillation column. Furthermore, it was difficult to manufacture adsorbents which had identical adsorptive properties from batch to batch. The design of a commercial adsorber and its operation had to be sufficiently flexible to cope with such variations. 

Dialysis operates by the diffusion of selected solutes across a nonporous membrane from high to low concentration. An early industrial application of dialysis was caustic soda recovery from rayon manufacturing. It had been a viable process because inexpensive but alkali-resistant cellulose membranes were available that were capable of removing polymeric impurities from the caustic. Gradually however, dialysis is being replaced by dynamic membrane technology for caustic soda recovery because of the latter s much higher productivity. 

In the laboratories of BASF (Badische Anilin- and Soda-Fabrik) at Ludwigshafen, the importance of infrared spectroscopy for industrial purposes was realized as early as the 1930 s. The first IR instrument with a modulated beam was built by Lehrer in 1937 and modified to a double beam instrument with optical compensation in 1942. Luft described the first non-dispersive infrared analyzer in 1943. He used the gas to be analyzed as absorber in a photo-acoustic detector cell. Thus, the instrument was sensitive only to this gas. He also provided a survey of early industrial applications of infrared spectroscopy (Luft, 1947). 

Natural Rubber-Based Composites and Nanocomposites Table 1 3 Early industrial applications of vulcanized... 

Useful information on the major industrial applications of selenium and tellurium can be traced in the old (1942), yet still expedient review of Waitkins et al. [4], based on most of the early (pre-war) references on the subject. Not much has changed since then, at least with regard to the industrial uses of these elements. 

I. M. Thommen, Homogeneous asymmetric hydrogenation Mature and fit for early stage drug development. Specialty Chemicals Magazine, May (2005). Hans-Ulrich Blaser, Felix Spindler and Marc Thommen, Industrial Applications m Handbook of Homogeneous Hydrogenation, (ed. J.G. de Vries and C. J. Elsevier), Wiley, (2007). 

The hydrogenation of allylic alcohols and a,/>-unsaluraled acids leads to products with a very high synthetic potential, and both transformations were used quite early for industrial applications. In both cases Ru complexes with axially chiral biaryl ligands (binap analogues) are the catalysts of choice. Here, we will dis-... 

Much activity is evident in the application of enzymes in synthetic and natural products chemistry (9-26). Surprisingly, this is not a new field of endeavor, but rather one that was extensively developed for application in solving synthetic chemical problems in the steroid field. The earliest work in this field took place during the early twentieth century, and serious industrial application of biocatalysis began in the late 1940s (8). The successes obtained in steroid chemistry clearly underlined the potential for biocatalysis to contribute in other areas of natural products chemistry including that with the alkaloids. 

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