Needs of the Chemical Industry

The individual needs and research directions for specific industries have been discussed above. However, there are a number of needs common to all industries that, if supplied, will aid materially in their future development education, more rational research and development schemes, initiation of more mission-oriented research, and certain organizational changes. 

A foremost need is to change the educational pattern of the country not only undergraduate education but also education and research projects leading to M.S. and Ph.D. degrees. Some of these have been indicated above. The problems of education in India are not new in 1933, C. L. Dhawan wrote (Ml)  

In general, the teachers at universities and colleges and the workers in government research laboratories have not been exposed to industrial practices. In most cases, their information is based entirely upon textbook 

An outstanding need, therefore, for the development of self-reliance in the chemical industry is a better interchange between the scientific laboratory and the professional personnel of the industries. This lack of dialogue between industry and research personnel is magnified by the lack of awareness on both sides of the need for it. 

The practice school programs now encompass all areas of engineering as well as other branches of study. BITS s chief sponsor is one of the largest industrialists in India, who has many chemical and industrial plants under his control. Therefore, the first practice school programs were established in Birla industries. Now, they are also in operation in other private industries and in the public sector. In all, there are 20 stations which service about 200 students every 6 months. These include banks, newspapers, design companies, manufacturing companies, and national laboratories. Most of these locations offer accommodations or pay 

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The term feedstock in this article refers not only to coal, but also to products and coproducts of coal conversion processes used to meet the raw material needs of the chemical industry. This definition distinguishes between use of coal-derived products for fuels and for chemicals, but this distinction is somewhat arbitrary because the products involved in fuel and chemical appHcations are often identical or related by simple transformations. For example, methanol has been widely promoted and used as a component of motor fuel, but it is also used heavily in the chemical industry. Frequendy, some or all of the chemical products of a coal conversion process are not isolated but used as process fuel. This practice is common in the many coke plants that are now burning coal tar and naphtha in the ovens. 

Our own research into best practice in this area does not surface one right answer, and given the vast differences between chemical companies, we would be very surprised if it did. Nevertheless, one organizational model seems to fit the needs of the chemical industry particularly well in our experience, this is an organization with global business divisions (i.e., product-based business units with worldwide control of all critically important business functions) as the main axle, guided by the corporate center and supported by shared services. About three quarters of the global players in chemicals have adopted this structure. 

The necessity to switch from nonrenewable fossil resources to renewable raw materials, such as carbohydrates and triglycerides derived from biomass, was an important conclusion of the Report of the Club of Rome in 1972 [2]. It should be noted, however, that ca. 80% of the global production of oil is converted to thermal or electrical energy. If the world is facing an oil crisis it is, therefore, an energy crisis rather than a raw materials crisis for the chemical industry. Indeed, there are sufficient reserves of fossil feedstocks to satisfy the needs of the chemical industry for a long time to come. 

The American Chemistry Council s Responsible Care Management System This section introduces a management system that was customized to address the needs of the chemical industry. 

What is unusual about ethylene is that it occurs only in trace amounts in nature. The enormous amounts of it required to meet the needs of the chemical industry are derived the world over by thermal cracking of hydrocarbons. In the United States and other areas of the world with vast reserves of natural gas, the major process for the production of ethylene is thermal cracking of the small quantities of ethane extracted from natural gas. In thermal cracking, a saturated hydrocarbon is converted to an unsaturated hydrocarbon plus H2. Heating ethane in a furnace to 800-900 °C for a fraction of a second cracks it to ethylene and hydrogen. 

Synthesis. Exploratory research has produced a wide variety of odorants based on natural stmctures, chemicals analogous to naturals, and synthetic materials derived from available raw materials and economical processing. As in most areas of the chemical industry, the search for new and useful substances is made difficult by the many materials that have been patented and successfully commercialized (4). In the search for new aroma chemicals, many new materials are prepared for screening each year. Chemists who perform this work are involved in a creative exercise that takes its direction from the commercial sector in terms of desirable odor types and specific performance needs. Because of economic limitations, considerations of raw material costs and available processing methods may play a role eady in the exploratory work. 

The need for weU-trained technical service professionals is expected to continue as an essential aspect of the chemical industry, despite the phenomenal growth ia electronic methods of information storage, retrieval, and transmission. Advanced troubleshooting of complex customer processes and accelerated accurate product development and market introductions should continue to be principal elements of technical service personnel duties. Increased levels of integration, perhaps blurring the lines between suppHer and customer, may come to pass. There are already instances of personnel swapping between customers and suppHers for extended periods to allow cross-fertilization of ideas and provide more accurate perspectives for the companies involved in these efforts. Technical service and research personnel have been those persons most directly involved in such efforts. 

For the manufacturing of sulfosuccinic acid esters, which belong to a special class of surfactants, maleic acid anhydride is needed. Maleic acid anhydride is an important intermediate chemical of the chemical industry. Its worldwide output amounts to about 800,000 tons (1990) [64]. Maleic acid is produced by catalytic vapor phase oxidation process of benzene or n-C4 hydrocarbons in fixed bed or fluidized bed reactors according the following reaction equations. The heat of reaction of the exothermic oxidation processes is very high. 

Soap is a salt made by reacting animal fats with lye, another name for a solution of sodium hydroxide in water. In the 1800s, the need for soap as the population expanded created a demand for sodium hydroxide. Thus, sodium hydroxide was another early product of the chemical industry. Other washing compounds can be made by treating phosphoric acid (or boric acid)... 

Current thinking focuses on the production process. What goes on inside the piant, and what is under the direct controi of the business. It tends to ignore what happens, both upstream and downstream where and how the raw materials are sourced, and how the products are actually used. What is needed in the chemical industry is a shift to life-cycle thinking. 

The urgency of the need for waste reduction is readily appreciated by considering the amount of waste generated per kg product, designated as the E factor solvents (Sheldon, 1992, 1992a, 1993, 1994, 1996, 1997, 1997a) in various segments of the chemical industry (Table 2.7). 

In view of the size of operation being contemplated, it is unlikely that homogeneous catalysts will play a primary role in the production of synthetic oil. However, from the standpoint of the chemical industry, the complex mixture of products obtained from the classical Fischer-Tropsch process is generally unattractive owing to the economic constraints imposed by costly separation/purification processes. What is needed is a catalyst system for the selective conversion of CO/H2 mixtures to added-... 

In this context the integration of HPLC in the SMB concept has shown a tremendous potential for the development of separation process which are efficient and versatile as well as economically sound. The first separations of pharmaceutical compounds using HPLC-SMB technology were performed in the early 1990s [6 - 8]. Other areas of application, e. g., the fine chemicals, cosmetics and perfume industries have since followed suit [9]. Most importantly and as a reaction to the needs of these new areas of application, SMB systems smaller than the huge SMB-plants adapted to the needs of the petrochemical industry, are now commercially available. 

Quill was founded in April 1999 as an industrial consortium, with members from all sectors of the chemical industry. It is based on the well-proven industry/uni-versity cooperative research center (lUCRC) concept developed by the U.S. National Science Foundation and is only the second lUCRC in Europe. There were 17 founding industrial members of the Quill consortium, and the current membership includes (listed alphabetically) bp. Chevron, Cytec, DuPont, Eastman Chemicals, ICI, Invista, Merck, Novartis, Procter and Gamble, SACHEM, SASOL, Shell, Strata, and UOP. Research carried out between QUB and individual companies, or by QUILL itself, has generated more than 20 patent applications, many of which have now been published, from as diverse a range of industries as BNFL, BP Chemicals, Cytec, ICI, Quest International, and Uni-chema Chemie BV. In a recent report in Nature, the need for collaboration between government, industry, and academic institutions to form sustainable chemistry centers was stressed as vital in order to rethink traditional chemistry processes to be not only beneficial to the environment but also to make economic sense for industry. Quill, under the codirection of Professors Kenneth R. Seddon and Jim Swindall OBE, is one of these chemistry centers, and is the first (and... 

In this review we will focus on their use as catalysts and promoters in the introduction of molecular oxygen into organic substrates. Oxidized hydrocarbons serve as important feedstocks for the chemical and pharmaceutical industries. Unfortunately, hydrocarbons are also infamous in their ability to resist oxidation under environmentally benign and easily controlled conditions. The large volume of these materials needed to satisfy the demand of the chemical industry economically precludes all stoichiometric oxidants, with the sole exception of molecular... 

The production of monomers and their reaction to form polymers account for more than half of the chemical industry, and the polymers and plastics industries are among the major employers of chemical engineers. Many of the reactions we have considered previously were concerned with methods of preparing the small molecule monomers that are used in preparing polymers. In this chapter we consider the reactors used to polymerize these molecules into polymers. We will see that the reactions we are trying to manage are sufficiently different so that the reactors needed for polymerization processes are qualitatively different than for other chemical processes. 

Another problem with fermentation products is often the limited outlet. The primary fermentation products such as alcohols require chemical transformations to convert them into species acceptable by the chemical industry as intermediates. This can normally occur through dehydration reactions [77]. For example, ethanol may need to be dehydrated into ethylene, isopropanol into propylene and n-butanol into n-butylene. These reactions are reversed petrochemical reactions and normally lead to products that have a lower selling price than the starting materials under the present structure of the chemical industry. For this reason, bioethanol is still used unchanged as an oxygenated gasoline additive. 

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