Research ReTurn

Researchers returned to the oxidation of ammonia in air, (recorded as early as 1798) in an effort to improve production economics. In 1901 Wilhelm Ostwald had first achieved the catalytic oxidation of ammonia over a platinum catalyst. The gaseous nitrogen oxides produced could be easily cooled and dissolved in water to produce a solution of nitric acid. This achievement began the search for an economic process route. By 1908 the first commercial facility for production of nitric acid, using this new catalytic oxidation process, was commissioned near Bochum in Germany. The Haber-Bosch ammonia synthesis process came into operation in 1913, leading to the continued development and assured future of the ammonia oxidation process for the production of nitric acid. 

The samples cannot be kept until the researcher returns ... 

When the researcher returned, the laboratory was pleased to be able to report the results they had obtained (Table 1.1). 

Molecular targets are not always obvious, even though cellular and histological disease pathologies have been well described in the literature. At this point, the researcher returns to the laboratory bench to design critical experiments (see Figure 4.2). 

Because the polyesters they were working with at that time had melting points too low for use in textile products, a deficiency that has since been removed, the researchers returned to the polyamides (nylons) that had earlier been put aside. They soon found that these polymers, too, could be "cold-drawn to increase... 

My research during the Cleveland years continued and extended the study of carbocations in varied superacidic systems as well as exploration of the broader chemistry of superacids, involving varied ionic systems and reagents. I had made the discovery of how to prepare and study long-lived cations of hydrocarbons while working for Dow in 1959-1960. After my return to academic life in Cleveland, a main... 

In the fall of 1976 I had a call from a friend, Sid Benson, who, after a decade at the Stanford Research Institute, just returned to the University of Southern California (USC) in Los Angeles. He invited me for a visit, telling me about USC s plans to build up seleeted programs, ineluding chemistry. I visited USC and found it, with its close to downtown urban campus, quite different from the sprawling expanse of the eross-town eampus of UCLA, whieh I had visited on a number of oe-... 

Many companies provide support for both their research personnel and technical service personnel to participate in these types of activities. Even a pohcy of one conference per person per year, if appHed correctiy, provides a great deal of value to the individual and to the organization. The returns on this investment iaclude intangibles such as additional technical contacts and enhancement of the technical reputation of the company, as well as tangibles such as personnel possessing the latest information in their fields of endeavor, allowing them to better address customer concerns and needs, and developing ideas for process and product improvements. 

Research and development ac tivities do not, in themselves, produce a salable product. Thus, they cannot direc tly generate a return on capital outlay. A successbil research and development projec t is one that results in an activity that earns revenue for the company. The life cycle of the revenue from an individual product may be as shown in Fig. 9-26. 

While most of the earlier research was done on metals and alloys, more recently a good deal of emphasis has been placed on ceramics and other inorganic compounds, especially functional materials used for their electrical, magnetic or optical properties. A very recent collection of papers on oxides (Boulesteix 1998) illustrates this shift neatly. In the world of polymers, the concepts of phase transformations or phase equilibria do not play such a major role 1 return to this in Chapter 8. 

A new chapter in the uses of semiconductors arrived with a theoretical paper by two physicists working at IBM s research laboratory in New York State, L. Esaki (a Japanese immigrant who has since returned to Japan) and R. Tsu (Esaki and Tsu 1970). They predicted that in a fine multilayer structure of two distinct semiconductors (or of a semiconductor and an insulator) tunnelling between quantum wells becomes important and a superlattice with minibands and mini (energy) gaps is formed. Three years later, Esaki and Tsu proved their concept experimentally. Another name used for such a superlattice is confined heterostructure . This concept was to prove so fruitful in the emerging field of optoelectronics (the merging of optics with electronics) that a Nobel Prize followed in due course. The central application of these superlattices eventually turned out to be a tunable laser. 

On his return home in 1911, Honda was appointed professor of physies at the new Tohoku Imperial University in Sendai, in the north of Japan this institution had been established only in 1906, when the finance minister twisted the arm of an industrialist who had made himself unpopular because of pollution eaused by his copper mines and extracted the necessary funds to build the new university. A provisional institute of physical and chemical research was initiated in 1916, divided into a part devoted to novel plastics and another to metals. This proved to be Honda s lifetime domain he assembled a lively team of young physicists and chemists. In the same year, Honda invented a high-cobalt steel also containing tungsten and chromium, which had by far the highest coercivity of any permanent-magnet material then known. He called it KS steel, for K. Sumitomo, one of his sponsors, and it made Honda famous. 

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