Week 1

First lesson of Introduction to Chemical Product Design

19 April 2021

Hello Blog! Today, our team would like to share some knowledge with you on what we had learnt about this new module, "Introduction to Chemical Product Design".

Definition of chemical product

Firstly, we were taught about what defines a chemical product. We learnt that chemical products do not only mean that the products are made of chemicals. In fact, any products that are designed and/or manufactured using Chemical Engineering principles can be defined as a chemical product. Now we know that there is more to what makes a chemical product than just chemicals. 

Categories of Chemical Products

Secondly, there are 4 categories that make up a chemical product; Commodities, Chemical Devices, Molecular products and Micro-structured products.  

Commodity chemicals are products manufactured by a number of different companies that are mostly in large amounts with minimal product variation from producer to producer. This means that products are considered identical, or nearly so, from an application's viewpoint, and more commonly than not are an exact compositional match. These include plastics, paints, detergents and organic/inorganic chemicals.  

Chemical products are products that are manufactured, processed, sold, or distributed by the company that are chemical substances, or contain or are comprised of chemical substances, preparations or mixtures of chemical substances. These can consist of inks, cleaning solvents etc.

Another kind of chemical product we learnt about is molecular products. These products are made by processing very specific chemical structures for specific uses. Usually discovered through hours of research, products include things like various medicines. Products like these are definitely hard to manufacture and probably requires many advanced skills to get started thus as for us we might not be that interested in molecular products.

The last chemical product we learnt about was micro-structured products. To put it simply, they are products with specific functions but with their texture as an important consideration. Things like soap and paint with their smooth texture are considered micro-structured products. Products like these require a lot of work done even on their smallest details and structure so maybe It would be hard for us to procure these products.

An activity we did during the lesson

Lastly, we were asked to perform a group activity on the chemical engineering principle of a product. As to how the activity worked, we were given a table filled with 2 category of products as shown below. From the table, we decided to pick the appliances under the household category. After a quick discussion, we decided that toaster is our chosen chemical product. As for the chemical engineering principle behind the toaster, it operates by heat transfer via conduction, convection and radiation to transfer the heat towards the bread to toast it. This could be achieved since electricity passes through the toaster, it heats up the filament wires inside the toaster. Hence, the hot filament wire will transfer the heat towards the bread resulting in toasted bread.

That's all for today! Thank you for reading!