THESIS
2018
ix, 92 pages : illustrations (some color) ; 30 cm
Abstract
Manufacturing has been the core to promote economic development and social progress since
industrial revolution. Chemical industry had emphasized on chemical manufacturing process
design. Starting from cost minimization, manufacturing has been evolving to consider more
factors including consumer preferences. Hence, chemical product design is starting to receive
increased attention. Consumer preferences and needs are dynamic and everchanging, therefore
a systematic procedure to guide the product design can reduce unnecessary trials and shorten
the time to market. Consumer-centred chemical products can be classified into four classes,
which are molecular products, formulated products, functional products and chemical devices.
There are extensive studies on the design of these prod...[
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Manufacturing has been the core to promote economic development and social progress since
industrial revolution. Chemical industry had emphasized on chemical manufacturing process
design. Starting from cost minimization, manufacturing has been evolving to consider more
factors including consumer preferences. Hence, chemical product design is starting to receive
increased attention. Consumer preferences and needs are dynamic and everchanging, therefore
a systematic procedure to guide the product design can reduce unnecessary trials and shorten
the time to market. Consumer-centred chemical products can be classified into four classes,
which are molecular products, formulated products, functional products and chemical devices.
There are extensive studies on the design of these products but often focused on a specific
product. Design frameworks had been offered but limited to molecular and formulated products.
As a result, conceptual design frameworks for chemical devices and functional products are
proposed based on the study of numerous products. The systematic procedures start by defining
the functions and specifying the technical requirement, followed by design and evaluation of
product concepts, and lastly the mass production process is designed. Chemical devices are
regarded as a simplified chemical plant, the design procedures also include selecting unit
operations and designing the operating conditions by modeling. Domestic dehumidifier and air
purifier are examples used to illustrate the framework. Functional products are built with
materials of specific structures. Manufacturing processes that are unconventional to chemical
engineers are often required to generate the desired structures. Knowledge of these
unconventional processing techniques are scattered, thus a classification is proposed to aid the
process selection. Surface addition processes are studied as the example. All in all, chemical
product design is still in development and this thesis had progressed it by providing guidance
to engineers to design any of the four classes of products.
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