Wednesday, January 12, 2011

Process Wednesday: the Cornforth quote

I've personally begun looking at routes and asking: does it pass the one-armed man test?:
It does, for example, no good to offer an elegant, difficult and expensive process to an industrial manufacturing chemist, whose ideal is something to be carried out in a disused bathtub by a one-armed man who cannot read, the product being collected continuously through the drain hole in 100% purity and yield. - Sir John Cornforth, Chemistry in Britain, 1975, 432.
Hardly anything does, but it's an ideal to keep in mind. Happy Wednesday!

7 comments:

  1. That's a decent description of reactive extrusion: dump in the ingredients (continuously)and out comes your polymer (continuously). We make a lot of money doing that.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Hey, John -- when that polymer comes out, what form does it take? i.e. what's the shape of the material after it's been extruded? Sheets? pellets?

    ReplyDelete
  3. It depends on a lot of factors. A die can shape it into various profiles or stands that can be chopped into pellet. Adhesives come out as a large diameter and typically fill 55 gal. drums. I've not seen sheets done as part of reactive extrusion, but I could be I suppose.

    ReplyDelete
  4. Dangers of reactive polymers: I worked briefly in the analytical lab at an epoxy plant. Among the weeds in the back lot there was a 20,000 L reactor with all the connections hacked off. Asked the boss what was up with it: "Well, son, that's what happens when you polymerize a batch."

    ReplyDelete
  5. eka-germanium: this is very funny, I have heard of couple screw-ups done on a plant scale and they all led to epic stories.

    ReplyDelete
  6. Harrison Ford is "The Chemist"
    'No sir, I didn't do it. It was the one-armed man!'

    ReplyDelete
  7. Another nice quote (I hope I repeat it correctly): You know that you have designed a robust process when no plant operator calls you in the middle of the night

    ReplyDelete

looks like Blogger doesn't work with anonymous comments from Chrome browsers at the moment - works in Microsoft Edge, or from Chrome with a Blogger account - sorry! CJ 3/21/20