Industrial fine chemicals future applications

Several industrial processes use phase-transfer techniques with soluble catalysts, mostly for fine chemical productions (42,43). It is easy to believe that this technology will find a greater application in the near future, perhaps with the use of polymer-supported catalysts. 

This chapter will attempt to summarize the application of chiral auxiliaries at a scale important to the chiral fine chemical business. In addition, and as important, there are numerous cases where a chiral auxiliary has been used in the early stages of pharmaceutical development and the potential exists for this approach to be used in future work at larger scale. Last, there exists a limited number of cases where the auxiliary exists as part of an active drug. The known industrial applications, the potential applications, and the presence of auxiliaries in active drugs will all be addressed. 

New applications are envisaged in the near future, particularly in the emerging area of bio-separation such as purification of enzymes, peptides, antibiotics and natural extracts. Numerous companies offer SMB equipments for the pharmaceutical and the fine chemical industries [2,8]. This technology covers a broad range of production scales from the laboratory units, which use chromatographic... 

In the future functional chemicals will play a much more significant role in the chemical industry. Functional chemicals are complicated systems and formulations consisting of various components, which sell because of their application-relevant properties. As opposed to commodities and fine chemicals, the customer does not purchase molecules, but rather an application-relevant effect the product performance is achieved by means of a targeted design of molecule systems. As a result of this development, the customer is provided with a high impact additive which has a very good price-performance ratio and which provides the essential component of his product. 

Photomicroreactors will remain an active area of research in the future, especially if interesting industrial applications can be identified by the fine chemical and pharmaceutical industries that make use of their described advantages. 

Green fibres like flax, jute, sisal, kenaf and fibres of allied plants, which have been used for more than 8000 years, are the present and will be the future raw materials not only for the textile industry but also for modern eco-friendly composites used in different areas of application like building materials, particle boards, insulation boards, food, fodder and nourishment, friendly cosmetics, medicine and source for other bio-polymers agro-fine chemicals and energy . Potentially, under optimum cultivation conditions, they cause little or no detrimental effect on the ecosystem, they can grow in different climatic zones and they recycle the carbon dioxide in the Earth s atmosphere. 

The individual self-contained volumes will each encompass a closely related field of applications and will demonstrate those methods which have found the widest applications in the area. The emphasis is expected to be on the comparison of published and established methods which have been employed in the application area rather than the details of experimental and novel methods. The volumes will also identify future trends and the potential impact of new technologies and new separation methods. The volumes will therefore provide up-to-date critical surveys of the roles that analytical separations play now and in the future in research, development and production, across the wide range of the fine and heavy chemical industry, pharmaceuticals, health care, food production and the environment. It will not be a laboratory guide but a source book of established and potential methods based on the literature that can be consulted by the reader. 

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