Organic structures, global

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. 

In recent years an increasing number of crystal structures have been solved by application of pure or hybrid global optimization methods applied to powder diffraction data. The most striking applications regard organic structures particularly resistant to traditional methods. The first organic material of... 

Table 8.1 Recent examples of organic structures solved by global optimization methods applied to powder diffraction data.

Thermodynamics plays an important role in the stability analysis of transport and rate processes, and the nonequilibrium thermodynamics approach in particular may enhance and broaden this role. This chapter reviews stability analysis based on the conventional Gibbs approach and tbe nonequilibrium thermodynamics theory. It considers the stability of equilibrium, near-equilibrium, and far-from-equilibrium states with some case studies. The entropy production approach for nonequilibrium systems appears to be more general for stability analysis. One major implication of the nonequilibrium thermodynamics theory is the introduction of distance from global equilibrium as a constraint for determining the stability of nonequilibrium systems. When a system is far from global equilibrium, the possibility of new organized structures of matter arise beyond an instability point. 

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