TABLE OF CONTENTS The manufacturing industry has drawn its efficiency from large-scale continuous processes over a long period. Initially, the manufacturing facility for a new product used to be either a batch process or a laboratory process on a larger scale. But as the economy of scale was key to success in business, chemical engineering and process industries focused all attention on designing and developing continuous processes. Continuous processes are dominant in manufacturing of bulk chemicals. However, for manufacturing fine and specialty chemicals, with the increased emphasis on and customer requirements of high quality, equal focus has been on batch processing. Today, almost half of the processes in industry are batch processes.
Following are the economic and technical factors that make batch processes favorable over continuous processes:
Batch processes often consist of simple processing units like mixers and stirrers.
A batch processing unit may be multi-purpose it may be used for several processing phases of the batch and could support multi-product manufacturing within the facility.
Batch manufacturing plants are comparatively more robust than a continuous plant.
Batch process manufacturing facility is easier to scale up depending on market demand and requirements.
Industrial processes are classified depending on the output of the process as:
Continuous process
Discrete process
Batch process.
In a continuous process, there is continuous flow of material or product. Processing the materials in different equipments produces the products. Each equipment operates in a single steady state and performs specific processing function.
Some...
