Scott Donald Barnicki

Process synthesis prospective

Chemical process synthesis methods and tools developed over the last several decades have reached a level of maturity that have provided advantage to practitioners in an environment of increased costs and shrinking margins. Future growth within the chemical process industries is likely to involve even keener competition with greater impact from factors such as raw material and energy availability, climate change mitigation, sustainability, and inherent security. The future will probably see an expanded role for the systematic generation process synthesis paradigm, including an increased interdependency with process and catalytic chemistry on one hand and operability and control expertise on the other. Advances from artificial intelligence may inspire new process synthesis paradigms incorporating more effective representations of the underlying physical sciences and engineering art, new social concerns, new design strategies, and new computerized implementations. The future may also see a collaboration of the systematic generation and superstructure optimization process synthesis paradigms in which systematic generation is used to create the superstructure for simultaneous discrete and continuous variable optimization. As the resulting process designs will certainly be evaluated from additional points of view including social considerations, superstructure optimization will need to produce families of good designs for multi-criteria Pareto optimization. There are many challenges, but continued progress will be made and these challenges will be met.

Synthetic Organic Chemicals

Synthetic organic chemicals are produced by the transformation of carbonaceous feedstocks into functionalized molecules through one or more chemical reactions. Such transformations are accomplished at vast industrial scales and the resulting products permeate every aspect of modern society. The molecules produced find use largely as monomers for polymer synthesis of ubiquitous plastics, or as task-specific ingredients for a myriad of applications as divergent as paint leveling agents to food preservatives. Advances in technology, significant increases in energy efficiency, as well as the utilization of fossil fuel-derived starting materials have resulted in unprecedented economy of scale and relatively stable product costs in spite of large relative increases in the price of oil and natural gas. The section entitled “Chemical Raw Materials and Feedstocks” covers the most important carbonaceous feedstocks currently utilized in the chemical processing industries, all derived from fossil fuel-based raw materials.