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.