Chemical and allied industries occupy one of the major part in manufacturing sector, these industries have grown in such a way that a countries economy and capital assets strongly bonded to their production and products consumption. After Second World War an industrial revolution brought the rise of chemical industry to produce products in mass production to reach the end user all over the globe.
All these chemical and allied industries are based on the research and engineering development done on the chemical processes which are seen today. The objective of design a chemical process is to convert any useless or low cost raw material to useful and profitable end product. This differs from other manufacturing process when compared to assemble industries which manufacture cars and aeroplanes.
A complete set of engineers and scientist have to work together to design and build a chemical process in such way that it do not harm the environment, produce safe product, give harmless by products, have high conversion and yield and ultimately produce a product with price that can be afford by a common man.
Some of the important engineers like a chemical engineer, mechanical engineer, civil engineer and chemist, together are sufficient to design a chemical process plant in pilot scale. The subjects required to get knowledge on chemical process designing and construct to full scale plant would be the basics of fundamental chemistry, thermodynamics, reaction kinetics, economics and unit operations.
Chemical and allied industries are classified based on the chemical process categories like:
- Natural product industries
- Inorganic chemical industries
- Organic chemical industries
- Polymerization industries
- Metallurgical industries
- Pollution control and hazards chemicals treatment industries.
And finally to understand what is really chemical process concerned would be the unit process of the industry some of the examples are given below which relates the unit process to chemical process industry:
| Unit process | Chemical process industry |
| Calcinations | Cement |
| Esterification | Oil and fat |
| Sulfonation | Surface active agents |
| Polymerization | Petroleum, plastics, elastomers and synthetic fibres |
The above are some examples of chemical process. New technologies are going change the definition of the chemical process in near future. Where every material can be converted and manufacture to a useful need. Even due to wide research on chemical process give a better result to protect the global atmosphere by converting the harmful chemical to neutral state. Yet we are in need of such technologies which prevent pollution forever.
Detail descriptions of a Chemical Process is done with help of process flowsheets and operation procedures that include manufacturing equipment working mechanism between streams.