EDITORIAL

Special Topic IssueÐProcess and Product DevelopmentProcess and Product Development in the chemicalindustry is an area where manufacturing companiesneed constantly to improve in order to maintain acompetitive advantage. Commercial pressures mean thatthe time which elapses between the discovery of a newproduct and its full scale manufacture must be kept to aminimum to maximize the return on investment in bothcapital and R&D. Often this activity is subject toregulatoryconstraints which limit the degreesof freedomof the process engineer in several key ways. Environ-mental and safety concerns mean that the choice of rawmaterials and solvents is frequently restricted to a subsetless than ideal from the point of view of technicalperformance. In the pharmaceutical area in particular,registration of the product and its manufacturingprocessat an early stage in its development may mean thatsigni® cant departures from the original laboratory recipeare not permitted. In the ® ne chemicals or contractmanufacturing environment, the need may well be to ®̀ t’a process into existing general purpose equipment tomeet a short term demand for a particular intermediate.For larger tonnage products such as pesticides andassociated intermediates, there may well be the oppor-tunity to manufacture at kg or 10s of kg scale. However,this type of production is frequently undertaken againsta background of mounting pressure to produce materialfor toxicity testing or market trials, rather than anenvironment where process development options can beexplored at larger scale. For products whose scale meritscontinuous processing, there is an incentive to avoidexpensive and time-consuming pilot plant constructionor at least to maximize the bene® t of such an activity. Inall cases the ability to interpret small scale e� ects and totranslate them into accurate predictions of full scaleperformance by understanding the underlying science isvital. This is not only the case for the manufacture ofthe active ingredient but increasingly in the productdelivery system, involving the process engineer informulation development for controlled releaseproducts, for example. This may well provide oppor-tunities for the process engineer to integrate the ® nalstates of product formulation with the earlier manu-facturing technology.

The relevanceof processand product development hasbeen emphasized by the Technology Foresight Pro-gramme and its views on process engineering researchand development. A recurring theme in the panel reportsis the importance of multi-disciplinary collaboration, akey requirement of e� ective process and productdevelopment. There is much talk in industry of encoura-ging chemical engineers to get involved earlier in processdevelopment, working alongside the chemists or labora-tory based scientists generating the preliminary smallquantities of a development compound and interpreting

the data obtained to allow extrapolation to larger scale.It is a theme which could be equally well embraced inacademia where collaboration between departments ofchemical engineering and, for example, chemistry orcolloid science have been the exception rather than therule in the past.

It is nowjust over two years since the ® rst special topicissue on process and product development when thenumber of papers was disappointingly low. In theintervening period the response has been a little betterbut continues to be less than ideal. There may be severalreasons. Probably most of the work undertaken in thisarea is in industry, where there is less incentive to publishand where con® dentiality may restrict opportunities todo so. Perhaps there is still an inclination to publishpapers

ion exchange, now ® nding more generalapplication than its original use as a treatment forradioactive wastes. The use of a mathematical modelhelps to generate fundamental understanding. Ranadealso employs modelling to aid understanding of thehydrodynamic behaviour of a bubble column reactor,enabling predictions of larger scale e� ects. The article byEvans et al. on preservative treatment of softwoodboards may at ® rst glance appear to have relevance onlyto that industry. However, the mathematical modellingof the mechanism describes a di� usion process through asolid using a set of parabolic di� erential equations, anapproach which has wider applicability and one whichlends itself ideally to the principle of gaining funda-mental understanding of the underlying science at anearly stage of process development.

The remaining papers in this issue are not speci® callylinked to process and product development, althoughsome are clearly related. The theme of modelling gas-solid reactions is continued by Abba and Hastaoglu.CFD modelling of mixing under laminar conditions isdescribed by Bakker et al. in a shorter communication,and the mixing theme is developed further by Brito-DeLa Fuento et al. in their study of non-Newtonianbehaviour with helical ribbon impellers. Amidpour andPolley address one of the problems of Pinch Technology,that of network structure, in their paper on process

Trans IChemE, Vol 75, Part A, January 1997

1

integration. Two papers broadly concerned withcontrol are included. Wang et al. present a designmethod based on frequency response ® tting, while Beckand Boucher look at the convergence of the numericalsolution to ¯ uid networks using a vortex ampli® er as acontrol device.

Li et al. have investigated the coagulation of a polymerlatex and the e� ect of various process parameters onproduct morphology, a good example of processdevelopment in the area of advanced materials. Other

topics covered in this issue include further examplesof heterogeneous catalysis with kinetic data for anoxidation reaction from Mantzvinos et al., and ananalysis of ¯ uid bed behaviour from Abashar andElnashaie. An approach to azeotropic distillationusing modi® ed UNIFAC predictions is described byGeorgoulaki and Korchinsky.

Alan Hall

Subject EditorÐProcess and Product Development

2 EDITORIAL

Trans IChemE, Vol 75, Part A, January 1997