Page 13 - Chemical and process design handbook

FM_Speight_HB1 11/8/01 3:44 PM Page xiii

PREFACE

Chemicals are part of our everyday lives. The hundreds of chemicals that
are manufactured by industrial processes influence what we do and how
we do it. This book offers descriptions and process details of the most pop-
ular of those chemicals. The manufacture of chemicals involves many
facets of chemistry and engineering which are exhaustively treated in a
whole series of encyclopedic works, but it is not always simple to rapidly
grasp present status of knowledge from these sources. Thus, there is a
growing demand for a text that contains concise descriptions of the most
important chemical conversions and processes of industrial operations.
This text will, therefore, emphasize the broad principles of systems of
chemicals manufacture rather than intimate and encyclopedic details that
are often difficult to understand. As such, the book will allow the reader to
appreciate the chemistry and engineering aspects of important precursors
and intermediates as well as to follow the development of manufacturing
processes to current state-of-the-art processing.
This book emphasizes chemical conversions, which may be defined as
chemical reactions applied to industrial processing. The basic chemistry
will be set forth along with easy-to-understand descriptions, since the
nature of the chemical reaction will be emphasized in order to assist in
the understanding of reactor type and design. An outline is presented
of the production of a range of chemicals from starting materials into
useful products. These chemical products are used both as consumer
goods and as intermediates for further chemical and physical modifica-
tion to yield consumer products.
Since the basis of chemical-conversion classification is a chemical one,
emphasis is placed on the important industrial chemical reactions and
chemical processes in Part 1 of this book. These chapters focus on the var-
ious chemical reactions and the type of equipment that might be used in
such processes. The contents of this part are in alphabetical order by reac-
tion name.
Part 2 presents the reactions and processes by which individual chemicals,
or chemical types, are manufactured and is subdivided by alphabetical listing

xiii