DR. VITUS BLOG

Industrial chemistry
The manufacture, sale, and distribution of
chemical products is one of the
cornerstones of a developed country.
Chemists play an important role in the
manufacture, inspection, and safe handling
of chemical products, as well as in product
development and general management. The
manufacture of basic chemicals such as
oxygen, chlorine, ammonia, and sulfuric
acid provides the raw materials for
industries producing textiles, agricultural
products, metals, paints, and pulp and
paper. Specialty chemicals are produced in
smaller amounts for industries involved with
such products as pharmaceuticals,
foodstuffs, packaging, detergents, flavours,
and fragrances. To a large extent, the
chemical industry takes the products and
reactions common to “bench-top” chemical
processes and scales them up to industrial
quantities.
The monitoring and control of bulk
chemical processes, especially with regard
to heat transfer, pose problems usually
tackled by chemists and chemical
engineers. The disposal of by-products also
is a major problem for bulk chemical
producers. These and other challenges of
industrial chemistry set it apart from the
more purely intellectual disciplines of
chemistry discussed above. Yet, within the
chemical industry, there is a considerable
amount of fundamental research undertaken
within traditional specialties. Most large
chemical companies have research-and-
development capability. Pharmaceutical
firms, for example, operate large research
laboratories in which chemists test
molecules for pharmacological activity. The
new products and processes that are
discovered in such laboratories are often
patented and become a source of profit for
the company funding the research. A great
deal of the research conducted in the
chemical industry can be termed applied
research because its goals are closely tied
to the products and processes of the
company concerned. New technologies
often require much chemical expertise. The
fabrication of, say, electronic microcircuits
involves close to 100 separate chemical
steps from start to finish. Thus, the
chemical industry evolves with the
technological advances of the modern
world and at the same time often
contributes to the rate of progress.