Synthesizing chemical plant design

Traditionally, one undertakes the design of a control system for a chemical plant only after a process flowsheet has been synthesized and designed or even constructed to a significant detail. This allows the... 

For about three decades, work has been in progress to develop software, so-called knowledge-based systems or expert systems, to assist the chemist in understanding the relationships between structure and properties, in designing syntheses, in elucidating the structure of reaction products, in planning chemical plants, etc. 

The therapeutically active dmg can be extracted from plant or animal tissue, or be a product of fermentation (qv), as in the case of antibiotics. Frequentiy, it is synthesized and designed to correlate stmcture with therapeutic activity. Pharmacologic activity is first tested on laboratory animals. When the results ate encouraging, physical and chemical properties are determined in the so-called preformulation stage, and analytical procedures are developed for quahty control (see Qualityassurance/qualitycontrol). 

It was then illustrated how a thermo-chemical process may be synthesized and designed if its components are thus thermoecon-omically isolated. The illustration was carried out on components of a large steam power plant, using simplified primary equations with subsequent corrections—the primary equations serving to illustrate clearly the tradeoff between useful energy costs and investment in equipment. 

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