Product Design – The Interaction between Chemistry,Technology and Marketing to Meet Customer Needs

During the 1990s the job profile of the process engineer in the chemical industry went through some lasting changes. Interdisciplinary project cooperation became established, aiming at competitive and thus rapid innovative leadership. The development of new or improved products must focus on customer needs. Besides production performance the customer mainly needs good handling properties and aesthetics. Product design includes both these considerations. We describe the career of a product, beginning with the initial idea and ending with the product being launched onto the market. A methodology for establishing and evaluating customers needs plays a key role in this process. Process engineering enables the technical realization while considering economic as well as time restrictions. This requires some creativity – and often the development of new technologies. Moreover, the successful completion of a project requires the staff involved to appreciate and accept their colleagues who come from the fields of either chemistry or business management (marketing and market research.)     

Business Models in Fine Chemical Engineering

Chemistry and pharmaceutical companies are increasingly awarding assignments for plant planning and construction to external engineering service providers. Both national and international companies with various business models are active in this growth market. A number of variously oriented engineering companies have specialized in the specific demands of planning plants for the production of fine chemicals and active ingredients for pharmaceuticals. Customers as well as the service‐providers themselves ask which companies or company models meet customer needs best in this segment. Which assignment form is the most efficient? Is it an award to a general contractor, possibly with a lump‐sum turnkey assignment? Or is the customer better off with individual planning assignments? A study with focus on the Central European fine chemical and pharmaceutical industries shows: there is no standardized engineering solution. Each business model has specific advantages and disadvantages; as a result, the partners must design their individual model. The respective contract form depends on many components – on product, time and cost pressure and, last not least, on the customer's remaining engineering competence.     

Challenges and opportunities in computer-aided molecular design

In this paper, the significant development, current challenges and future opportunities in the field of chemical product design using computer-aided molecular design (CAMD) tools are highlighted. With the gaining of focus on the design of novel and improved chemical products, the traditional heuristic based approaches may not be effective in designing optimal products. This leads to the vast development and application of CAMD tools, which are methods that combine property prediction models with computer-assisted search in the design of various chemical products. The introduction and development of different classes of property prediction methods in the overall product design process is discussed. The exploration and application of CAMD tools in numerous single component product designs, mixture design, and later in the integrated process-product design are reviewed in this paper. Difficulties and possible future extension of CAMD are then discussed in detail. The highlighted challenges and opportunities are mainly about the needs for exploration and development of property models, suitable design scale and computational effort as well as sustainable chemical product design framework. In order to produce a chemical product in a sustainable way, the role of each level in a chemical product design enterprise hierarchy is discussed. In addition to process parameters and product quality, environment, health and safety performance are required to be considered in shaping a sustainable chemical product design framework. On top of these, recent developments and opportunities in the design of ionic liquids using molecular design techniques have been discussed.     

Computational design of structured chemical products

In chemical product design, the aim is to formulate a product with desired performance. Ingredients and internal product structure are two key drivers of product performance with direct impact on the mechanical, electrical, and thermal properties. Thus, there is a keen interest in elucidating the dependence of product performance on ingredients, structure, and the manufacturing process to form the structure. Design of product structure, particularly microstructure, is an intrinsically complex problem that involves different phases of different physicochemical properties, mass fraction, morphology, size distribution, and interconnectivity. Recently, computational methods have emerged that assist systematic microstructure quantification and prediction. The objective of this paper is to review these computational methods and to show how these methods as well as other developments in product design can work seamlessly in a proposed performance, ingredients, structure, and manufacturing process framework for the design of structured chemical products. It begins with the desired target properties and key ingredients. This is followed by computation for microstructure and then selection of processing steps to realize this microstructure. The framework is illustrated with the design of nanodielectric and die attach adhesive products.     

A methodology for simultaneous process and product design in the formulated consumer products industry: The case study of the detergent business

In this work we present a mathematical optimization based methodology for simultaneous formulae and process design in the consumer product business applied to the case of the laundry detergent. The design of a new detergent is formulated as a modified pooling problem including process, performance, processability and environmental constraints. This new features add a number of nonlinearities related to the modeling of the different aspects of the process and customer acceptance. The problem becomes a multiobjective optimization problem that is solved using the ?-constraint method with global optimization techniques to minimize of the environmental impact while minimizing the production cost for a couple of case studies. As future work, further process, product and legal constraints can be added to make the problem more realistic.     

A conceptual model for chemical product design

The fundamental principles of chemical product design and associated systematic tools, within a broad domain of chemical products including molecules, formulations, and devices, are still under development. In this article, we propose a simple and fundamental conceptual model that defines the chemical product design problem as the inversion of three central design functions: quality, property, and process functions. The classic iterative cycles of product design problems may be envisioned as alternating between inversion and evaluation of these three functions, or in other words alternating between synthesis and analysis of solutions. On top of the proposed basic structure of the overall design problem, we then discuss the formulation of some subproblems as optimization problems and describe some useful solution tools. Three application examples are provided, including a more detailed case of formulation of a pharmaceutical ointment. © 2014 American Institute of Chemical Engineers AIChE J, 61: 802–815, 2015     

化学产品过程开发实验平台--公斤实验室的建设和应用

以化工产品设计和过程开发为导向,建立了一个化工产品过程开发实验平台--化工产品公斤实验室Kilo-lab.该公斤规模试验装置可进行反应、结晶、分离、提纯等系列产品的开发过程,研究了流程装置集成和柔性生产系统的规律和特征,为小批量、多品种、高附加值化学产品快速响应市场的变化和需求,以及过程开发的工业化放大提供理论和实验依据.     

Automated robotic platforms in design and development of formulations

Product design for formulations is an active and challenging area of research. The new challenges of a fast-paced market, products of increasing complexity, and practical translation of sustainability paradigms require to re-examine the existing theoretical frameworks to include the advantages deriving from the new reality of digitalization of business and research. In this work, we review the existing approaches, clearly stating the role of automation and machine-learning-guided optimization in the broader framework. Moving from this, we review the state of the art of automated hardware and software for formulated product design, and identify the open challenges for future research. Perspectives are given on the emerging fields of automated discovery, scale-up, and multistage optimization, and a unitary picture of the existing connections is provided, in the general context of a completely digital R&D workflow.     

基于模型的化工产品设计方法——综述与展望

近年来,化学工业的重点持续向亟需大宗化学品及高附加值化工产品的生产转化。这些化工产品的开发不仅需要相应的产品筛选与设计方法,同时需要对其可持续的生产过程、经济效益以及环境影响加以考虑。因此,化工产品的开发是一个系统性的多尺度问题。本文对基于模型的化工产品设计方法进行了综述与展望。基于模型的化工产品设计可以对大量可能的设计结果进行快速的虚拟筛选,从而大大降低实验成本。然而,对于不同的产品类型,准确的模型、数据以及规则方法通常难以获取,从而限制了基于模型方法的大规模应用。另外,产品开发的多尺度、跨学科特性也使得产品设计问题变得非常复杂。因此,为获得创新的设计结果,能够降低产品设计问题复杂度的系统性的建模方法的开发已成为近年来的研究热点。本文综述了近年来化工产品设计方法及应用的研究热点问题,对基于实验、经验规则、数学模型等方法的产品设计模型与相关软件开发进行了系统的回顾,对化工产品设计未来的挑战与机遇进行了讨论。     

Erfolgsmodelle von Anlagenplanungsunternehmen in der Feinchemie

Success Models of Plant Planning Companies in Fine Chemicals A number of variously oriented engineering companies have specialized in the specific demands of planning plants for the production of fine chemicals and active ingredients for pharmaceuticals. Customers as well as the service‐providers themselves ask which companies or company models best meet customer needs in this segment. Which assignment form is the most efficient? Is it an award to a general contractor, possibly with a lump‐sum turnkey assignment? Or is the customer better off with individual planning assignments? A study with a focus on the Central European fine chemical and pharmaceutical industry shows: There is no standardized engineering solution. Each business model has specific advantages and disadvantages; as a result, the partners must design their individual model. The respective contract form depends on many components – product, time and cost pressure, and not least of all, on the customer’s remaining engineering competence.     

Product design: A pricing framework accounting for product quality and consumer awareness

A systematic framework has been developed to determine the optimal price of a completely new (or existing but improved) chemical product that is being launched (or relaunched) in the presence of a competing product. It has four elements. The first is a pricing model derived from a utility function with constant elasticity of substitution. It accounts for consumers' awareness of the product under consideration and consumer preferences. The second is a set of relationships relating the consumer preferences and the relevant sales data available to a relaunched product to the parameters of the pricing model. In the absence of sales data for a completely new product, the third element is a set of heuristics for choosing a pricing strategy and estimates of the pricing model parameters. The optimal price is finally determined in a profit maximization problem subject to the market size as well as any other constraints. This pricing framework allows simultaneous optimization of product quality and price using product specifications as design variables. It is illustrated with an example on energy drinks. © 2018 American Institute of Chemical Engineers AIChE J, 64: 2462–2471, 2018     

Design of formulated products: Experimental component

A systematic methodology for the design and verification of chemical‐based products is proposed. By integrating modeling, and experiments, the search space is efficiently scanned to identify the feasible product candidates. The product design (or verification) problem consists of three stages: computer‐aided design (Stage 1), which generates a list of feasible candidates, experimental planning (Stage 2), which generates a list of experiments and checks the available experimental set‐ups, and experimental testing (Stage 3), which measures the necessary data and verifies the desirable attributes of the final product. The first stage (Stage 1) has been covered in previous publications, along with detailed case studies. The development of Stage 2 and Stage 3 is considered in this article and highlighted through two case studies involving the design and validation of an insect repellent lotion and a sunscreen lotion. © 2011 American Institute of Chemical Engineers AIChE J, 2012     

三聚氰胺成品处理与包装设计

三聚氰胺是一种用于能优化诸如工程塑料、涂料等材料性能的添加剂,福建三明化工总厂的13.8kt/a三聚氰胺工程项目系引进意大利欧洲技术公司的专利技术,在工艺、设备和自控等方面的设计有其独到之处,作者就其中属粉体工程专业范畴的成品处理与包装方面作了介绍,并对在施工中如何处理好所出现的问题,谈了自己的体会。     

Product color emotional design adaptive to product shape feature variation

When a user selects a product, he/she considers the emotional experience induced by the product color. However, when affected by product shape feature, the color image perception space of a user becomes more complex and dynamic. To address this problem, a product color emotional design method adaptive to product shape feature variation is proposed in this article. Based on psychological means, factor analysis and semantic differential methods are used to elucidate the mechanism for the formation of a color image perception space of a user influenced by product shape feature. Using support vector regression, a product color image evaluation model adaptive to product shape feature variation is constructed, and is then optimized via a genetic algorithm. A corresponding design system is constructed based on the method proposed in this article. A case study involving the design of a thermos for children is presented to demonstrate the operational procedure involved in the proposed method and to verify its performance. The results of the verification experiments confirm that the design scheme from system recommendation essentially meets the anticipated image target and assists the designer effectively. The method and system proposed in this study can generate a product color design scheme, which is unconstrained by shape feature and can satisfy user emotional preferences and needs, and have a certain applicability and practicability.     

Produkt‐Design – Zusammenwirken von Chemie,Technik und Marketing im Dienste des Kunden

Product Design – Teaming up Chemistry and Engineering with Marketing towards Customer Orientation The job profile of the process engineer in chemical industry has gone through a lasting change in the 1990s. Thus, interdisciplinary team work in projects has been established with the aim to create an innovation leadership of the company that is competitive and fast. Developing unique and improved products has brought the consumer’s needs into focus. Besides the product performance, the user‐friendliness as well as the aesthetics are important aspects that should be taken into account during product design. The history of a product, starting from the idea and ending with its market launch, is described. In this connection, the methodology of the determination and evaluation of consumer needs is a main issue. Process engineering enables the technical execution, whereby the economic as well as the time targets is considered. Hence, creativity are required – and not seldom the creation of novel technologies. Bringing a project to a successful conclusion implies understanding for and appreciation of the colleagues involved from other departments, such as chemistry and business administration (marketing and market research).     

通过化工产品工程开发可持续的技术来控制斑纹蚌种群

The zebra mussel is an important aquatic pest that causes great damage to freshwater-dependent industries, due to biofouling. The main goal of the project discussed here is to develop improved solutions to control this species. Three approaches have been explored in an attempt to design innovative application strategies for existing biocides： （i） encapsulation of toxins; （ii） combination of toxins; （iii） investigation of the seasonal variation of the species＇ tolerance to toxins. In this paper, the principles behind these approaches and the major results on each topic are presented. The benefits of adopting a chemical product engineering approach in conducting this project are also discussed.     

A knowledge-based ingredient formulation system for chemical product development in the personal care industry

The formulation of personal care products involves a trial-and-error approach to testing different combinations of chemicals. Specific knowledge plays an important role in creating the desired product properties. Without knowledge support tools, the formulation process becomes iterative. Furthermore, personal care products cannot be designed without analyzing market needs, and their development thus involves the collaboration of the formulators and the marketing teams. Miscommunication can reduce the efficiency and effectiveness of the process. This paper presents a knowledge-based ingredient formulation system for supporting chemical product development in the personal care industry. Case-based reasoning is used to solve ingredient formulation problems with reference to how similar past problems have been solved. The system also acts as a collaborative platform for sharing knowledge among the various stakeholders. A case study confirms the viability of the system, and the results show that the system provides formulators with key knowledge, enabling effective product formulation.     

考虑环境因素的天然气化工产品链设计

本文针对当前环境需要和天然气化工企业状况,提出延伸天然气化工产品链,增强市场竞争力的构想。将环境意识纳入设计过程中,提出天然气化工产品链设计的概念和实施步骤,有助于设计人员做出正确的决策,开发出环境友好、经济节约的产品。     

Development of web-based support system for on-line optimization

On-line optimization is a very powerful tool that saves costs and improves the operational productivity of a chemical plant. However, the process of on-line optimization takes too much time and cost because it needs the significant contribution of process optimization specialists. To solve this problem, a web-based support system for online optimization is designed. The design specifications of the target product are identified using product design tools such as house of quality and roof correlation matrix. The design specifications are implemented into three product modules: communication module, project management module, and information interaction module. The final prototype system is evaluated based on a real application to the on-line optimization of a PTA process. The system shows both the time and the cost could be reduced by 43.5% and 43.3%.     

化学产品工程再认识

化学产品工程作为化学工程学科的一个新方向或化学工程学科的新范式已提出很多年,但学术界对其学科内涵理解不一。本文对化学产品工程的学科内涵进行了分析和探讨,认为其核心是通过过程和设备对产品的纳微结构和复杂大分子结构进行调控;化学产品工程仍隶属过程工程,是面向高附加值产品、实现产品结构可控、定向、高效制备的过程工程。通过与传统的以满足市场需求和提高生产效率为目标的过程开发和放大的化学工程研究类比,提出了化学产品工程的主要研究内容,并讨论了其研究的方法论问题,以推动相关的基础研究工作。