Research carried out in the laboratories of industry and universities is only the first step. These discoveries have to be converted into realistic industrial processes. This is the job of the chemical products engineer who is responsible for translating the laboratory chemistry to a larger scale. Scaling up production from grams under laboratory conditions to thousands of tonnes in a full scale industrial plant is very painstaking work for chemists and chemical products. The intermediate stages between laboratory and full scale production involve equipment that is able to mimic the large scale process and enable the most favourable conditions to be found for a high yield of product obtained at a suitable rate (Figure 7).
This is a very important step as often the conditions that are suitable for the process in the laboratory are not necessarily suitable when the process is transferred to larger scale equipment. Thus many experiments under very carefully controlled conditions are carried out to obtain the maximum yield. The chemists and chemical products doing this work must also bear in mind the maximum yield may involve additional costs which make the process uneconomic.
Designing a plant is a team project and chemists, plant designers and chemical products select suitable materials for the construction of the plant. Although the common image is of chemical products plants made from gleaming steel, many other materials are used in their construction including a wide variety of metals, plastics, glass and rubber. As construction materials are themselves chemicals, choosing materials which do not react with the chemical products involved in the process is essential to avoid hazardous interactions, the breakdown of the plant, or the contamination of the product.
Safety must be at the top of the chemical industry’s agenda and for good reason. Many of its products are potentially hazardous at some stage during their manufacture and transport. These chemical products may be solids, liquids or gases, flammable, explosive, corrosive and/or toxic. Manufacturing processes frequently involve high temperatures, high pressures, and reactions which can be dangerous unless carefully controlled. Because of this the industry operates within the safety limits demanded by national and international legislation.

In spite of dealing with hazardous operations, the chemical products industry actually has a lower number of accidents than industry as a whole. Between 1995 and 2005, across the whole of European manufacture of all types, there were over 4 injuries for every 1000 employees, twice that sustained in the chemical industry. US data, recorded as days lost due to accidents, show an even starker difference; the number of days lost in major companies in the chemical products industry through accidents is 4 times less than in manufacturing generally.