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Workshop
Course on Integrated Chemical Product-Process DesignProfessor Rafiqul Gani, Professor Iqbal Mujtaba and Professor Nazmul Karim ObjectiveThe objective of this 2-days short course is to give the participants a view of chemical product design and the important process design issues related to their development (product-centric process design). The workshop will highlight how to define the needs of a chemical product; how to identify the candidate chemicals and/or mixtures of chemicals and how to quickly evaluate the important process design issues so that decisions related to product development can be made in the early stages of product development. The objective is also to highlight the currently available methods and tools that can be applied to solve various types of problems associated with product-process design in a systematic and integrated manner. BackgroundIn chemical product design and development, one first tries to find a candidate product that exhibits certain desirable or targeted behaviour and then tries to find a process that can manufacture it with the specified qualities. The candidate may be a single chemical, a mixture, or a formulation of active ingredients and additives. For the later product type, additives are usually added to an identified active ingredient (molecule or mixture) to significantly enhance its desirable (target) properties. Examples of chemical products, such as functional chemicals (solvents, refrigerants, lubricants, etc.), agrochemicals (pesticides, insecticides, etc.), pharmaceuticals & drugs, cosmetics & personal care products, home and office products, etc., can be found everywhere. In this workshop, the term “chemical product design” will be used to also include some aspects of “chemical product development”. Also, unless otherwise specified, the term “product” will only include various types of chemical products. Even though it is possible to identify many chemicals or their formulations as potential chemical products, only a small percentage actually becomes one. Finding a suitable process that can reliably, efficiently and economically manufacture the identified chemical with the desired product qualities as well as evaluating product performance during application and analyzing market trends play important roles in product design and development. From a process point of view there are products where the reliability of the quality of the manufactured chemical may be the deciding factor (for example, drugs & agrochemicals), while there are others where the cost of manufacturing the product is at least as important as the reliability of the product quality (solvents, refrigerants, lubricants). This means that product-centred process design is important because identifying a feasible chemical product is not enough; it needs to be produced through a sustainable process. Also, while in the case of functional chemicals, the identified molecule or mixture is the final product, in the case of chemicals based consumer products (drugs, cosmetics & personal care products, etc.); they are intermediate products from which the final products are obtained through additional processing. Therefore, the performance of the manufactured product, when applied, needs to be tested and validated. For some functional chemical products (such as solvents and refrigerants) this may be straight forward, but for some consumer products (such as drugs and food-products), it may not be so straight forward. Course Lecturers
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