Chemical Process Innovation

Production of a metal is usually achieved by a sequence of chemical processes represented as a flow sheet. A limited number of unit processes are commonly used in extractive metallurgy. The combination of these steps and the precise conditions of operations vary significantly from metal to metal, and even for the same metal these steps vary with the type of ore or raw material. The technology of extraction processes was developed in an empirical way, and technical innovations often preceded scientific understanding of the processes. 

The chemical industry represents a 455-billion-dollar-a-year business, with products ranging from cosmetics, to fuel products, to plastics, to pharmaceuticals, health care products, food additives, and many others. It is diverse and dynamic, with market sectors rapidly expanding, and in turmoil in many parts of the world. Across these varied industry sectors, basic unit operations and equipment are applied on a daily basis, and indeed although there have been major technological innovations to processes, many pieces of equipment are based upon a foundation of engineering principles developed more than 50 years ago. 

Plastics are highly resistant to a variety of chemicals. They have a high strength per unit weight of material therefore, they are of prime importance to the designer of chemical process equipment. Their versatility in properties has provided new and innovative designs of equipment. They are excellent substitutes for expensive nonferrous metals. 

Basic process chemistry using less hazardous materials and chemical reactions offers the greatest potential for improving inherent safety in the chemical industry. Alternate chemistry may use less hazardous raw material or intermediates, reduced inventories of hazardous materials, or less severe processing conditions. Identification of catalysts to enhance reaction selectivity or to allow desired reactions to be carried out at a lower temperature or pressure is often a key to development of inherently safer chemical synthesis routes. Some specific examples of innovations in process chemistry which result in inherently safer processes include ... 

Innovative chemical synthesis procedures have been proposed as offering potential for economical and environmentally friendly routes to a variety of chemicals. These novel chemical reactions also offer potential for increasing the inherent safety of processes by eliminating hazardous materials, eliminating chemical intermediates, or allowing... 

A database of the hazards associated with different types of equipment and unit operations including the applicability of inherently safer technology in each. As innovative solutions to hazards in equipment and process operations are discovered these could be included in this database for use by others in reducing risk in similar equipment and processes. A summary of design approaches for a number of common types of chemical process equipment will be published in CCPS (1997). This summary may be a starting point for the development of this database. 

Elame arresters for chemical process equipment and flammable liquid containers have been available for over 120 years. A US patent was issued as early as 1878 for a spark-arrester (Allonas 1878), while another spark-arrester was patented in 1880 (Stewart 1880). Numerous US patents have been issued for various designs of flame arresters, with one as recent as 1995 (Ronssakis and Brooker 1995). In Germany, patents were issued in 1929 and 1939 for flame arresters that contained shock absorber internals upstream of the flame arrester elements. This innovation made them suitable as detonation arresters (Wanben 1999). 

Heterogeneous catalytic systems offer the advantage that separation of the products from the catalyst is usually not a problem. The reacting fluid passes through a catalyst-filled reactor m the steady state, and the reaction products can be separated by standard methods. A recent innovation called catalytic distillation combines both the catalytic reaction and the separation process in the same vessel. This combination decreases the number of unit operations involved in a chemical process and has been used to make gasoline additives such as MTBE (methyl tertiai-y butyl ether). 

U., Wenka, a., Schubert, K., Microstructure devices for thermal and chemical process engineering, in Proceedings of the Japan Chemical Innovation Institute (JCII)... 

Catalysis is a core technology of the current fossil fuel based economy. Over 90% of industrial chemical processes involve catalytic steps and, also, several processes in current refineries are catalytic ones. Without continuous progress and innovation in catalysis, the current pervasive oil-based economy is not possible. Similarly, catalysis technology will also have a key role in the transition to a biobased economy. The possibility of realizing this transition and to develop effective bio-refineries will depend on the progress made in developing new catalytic processes and concepts. 

To overcome health and environmental problems at the source, the chemical industry must develop cleaner chemical processes by the design of innovative and environmentally benign chemical reactions. Green chemistry offers the tools for this approach. ... 

Brennecke, J.F., and Maginn, E.J., Ionic liquids Innovative fluids for chemical processing, AIChE /., 47,2384-2389,2001. 

In the context of chemical production, a process innovation may be defined as an addition to knowledge which allows some quantity of output to be produced by an input combination that could not previously be used to produce that output. For an innovation to be economically interesting, the innovation should result in a lower cost of production than other techniques at some combination of input prices. Whether the Innovation is actually used in production will depend on a host of factors, including the patterns of input prices which producers face and the desirability of adding to capacity at the time that input prices favor the innovative technology. This last point assumes —often realistically, for chemical processes—that innovations frequently require changes in plant and equipment that would be undertaken only if justified by expected demand growth. 

There are many chemically reacting flow situations in which a reactive stream flows interior to a channel or duct. Two such examples are illustrated in Figs. 1.4 and 1.6, which consider flow in a catalytic-combustion monolith [28,156,168,259,322] and in the channels of a solid-oxide fuel cell. Other examples include the catalytic converters in automobiles. Certainly there are many industrial chemical processes that involve reactive flow tubular reactors. Innovative new short-contact-time processes use flow in catalytic monoliths to convert raw hydrocarbons to higher-value chemical feedstocks [37,99,100,173,184,436, 447]. Certain types of chemical-vapor-deposition reactors use a channel to direct flow over a wafer where a thin film is grown or deposited [219]. Flow reactors used in the laboratory to study gas-phase chemical kinetics usually strive to achieve plug-flow conditions and to minimize wall-chemistry effects. Nevertheless, boundary-layer simulations can be used to verify the flow condition or to account for non-ideal behavior [147]. 

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