Chemical Product Engineering:

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Chemical Product Engineering The Third Paradigm
Michael Hill M Hill Associates, LLC and
Columbia University New York, NY,
USA mih16_at_columbia.edu
ESCAPE-18 2 June 2008 Lyon, France
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What Is a Chemical Product?

• Functional material which meets specific need
• Performance chemicals
• Semi-conductors
• Pharmaceuticals
• Paints
• Personal Care products
• Processed foods
• Household products
• Devices

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Commodities vs. Products

• Commodities
• Compositional spec
• Generic
• Low margin
• High volume
• Process-centered

• Products
• Performance spec
• Differentiated
• High margin
• Often low volume
• Product-centered

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Trend Affecting ChE Employment
Cussler Wei, AIChE J, 49 1073
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What Can ChEs Contribute?

• Designing a product should benefit from
  understanding of behavior during use
• Product use is a process
• Same fundamental knowledge base for understanding
  product manufacture can also provide
  understanding of product use

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Similarities Differences

• Process Design
• Product is specified but process is not
• Focus on models of manufacturing process
• Search technique to select among process
  alternatives
• Goal is lowest cost manufacturing process

• Product Design
• Neither product nor process is specified
• Focus on models of product properties
• Search technique to select among product
  alternatives
• Goal is added value through enhanced product
  properties

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Similarities Differences

• Process Design
• Product is specified but process is not
• Focus on models of manufacturing process
• Search technique to select among process
  alternatives
• Goal is lowest cost manufacturing process

• Product Design
• Neither product nor process is specified
• Focus on models of product properties
• Search technique to select among product
  alternatives
• Goal is added value through enhanced product
  properties

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Product Design Engineering require new mindset!
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(No Transcript)
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What is a paradigm?

• Thomas Kuhn (1962) Specific way of viewing
  scientific reality, the mindset of a scientific
  community
• Affects both choice of problems and acceptable
  approaches for solving
• Inadequacies frequently minimized or ignored
• If and when paradigm reaches a crisis, a new
  paradigm will arise

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Chemical Engineering Paradigms

• Early chemical engineering
• First Paradigm Unit Operations
• Second Paradigm Chemical Engg Science

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Why a Third Paradigm?

• Chemical engineering community largely ignored
  all product issues other than costs and purity as
  irrelevant
• Focused on processing while leaving product
  development to chemists
• Chemical engineering has been synonymous with
  process engineering

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Need a product engineering mindset to solve
problems where both product and its
manufacturing process must be identified!
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How Should Products Be Developed?

• Historically scientific experimentation
• Often accelerated through either high-throughput
  experimentation or experimental design, yet both
  inherently limited
• Better systematic way to identify problem
  solutions that minimizes experimentation

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Role of Product Design

• To specify a small set of formulations likely to
  meet product requirements, confirmed or refined
  through experimentation
• Phase of chemical product development preceding a
  more focused experimental program

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Product Design Algorithm

• Cussler Moggridge
• Identify customer needs
• Generate ideas to meet those needs
• Select among the ideas
• Manufacture the product

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Product Design Algorithm

• Cussler Moggridge
• Identify customer needs
• Generate ideas to meet those needs
• Select among the ideas
• Manufacture the product

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How to Do This?

• Creativity techniques can help, but need more
  than just brainstorming and selection
• Need a generic methodology to systematically
  transform each novel approach into set of product
  alternatives, and to quantitatively analyze those
  alternatives

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Homogeneous Products

• Properties result solely from components and not
  a product microstructure generated during
  processing
• Product and process can be designed sequentially
  rather than simultaneously
• Algorithm of Cussler Moggridge useful, though
  needs be expanded with additional details

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Additional Steps

• Determine profitability
• Discounted cash flow analysis of investments
  insufficient
• Need calculate market size that must be achieved
  for revenue to cover fixed costs, known as
  break-even
• Assess all uncertainties that should be followed
  up by experimentation (risks)

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Optimization

• After completing the design cycle, the designer
  can iteratively reassess all previous decisions
  to maximize profitability
• Designer can also use suboptimal product as
  starting point for mathematical optimization

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Structured Products

• Achieve properties through a microstructure,
  determined by interaction of components and
  manufacturing process
• Product and process must be designed
  simultaneously
• Need generic design methodology to systematically
  generate alternatives, and to quantitatively
  analyze those alternatives

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Possible Approaches

• Generation and systematic reduction of the number
  of alternatives through heuristics
• Optimization of set of all potential alternatives
  through mathematical programming

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Pros and Cons

• Mathematical Programming
• Useful when sufficient data available
• Techniques already exist
• Heuristics
• Required when data are limited, such as early
  stages of design
• Significant work is still needed for heuristic
  framework general problem

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Conclusions

• Chemical Product Design requires the same
  knowledge base as Process Design but a different
  mindset and new approaches
• Comprehensive generic methodology for structured
  products in absence of complete data still needed
• Methodology would accelerate new product
  development well beyond capabilities of purely
  experimental techniques