Speciality Chemicals
Introduction
Speciality chemicals are particular chemical products which provide a wide variety of effects on which many other industry sectors rely. Such industries that depend heavily on it are automotive, aerospace, food, cosmetics, agriculture, manufacturing, and textiles. They can be some kind of formulation or single chemical entities whose chemical composition influences the end product.
Speciality chemicals are made with extensive research and development, which is the main difference between them and commodity chemicals. They have only one or two core applications, unlike commodity chemicals which have dozens of different applications.
Manufacturing Of Speciality Chemicals
Speciality chemicals are usually manufactured in batch chemical plants using batch processing techniques. A batch process is one in which a defined quantity of product is made from a fixed input of raw materials during a measured period of time. The batch process most often consists of introducing accurately measured amounts of starting materials into a vessel followed by a series of processes involving mixing, heating, cooling, making more chemical reactions, distillation, crystallization, separation, drying, packaging etc., taking place at predetermined and scheduled intervals. The manufacturing processes are supported by activities such as the quality testing, storage, warehousing, logistics of the products, and management by recycling, treatment and disposal of by-products, and waste streams. For the next “batch” the equipment may be cleaned and the above processes repeated.