Book excerpt: Industrial Chemical Process Analysis and Design uses chemical engineering principles to explain the transformation of basic raw materials into major chemical products. The book discusses traditional processes to create products like nitric acid, sulphuric acid, ammonia, and methanol, as well as more novel products like bioethanol and biodiesel. Historical perspectives show how current chemical processes have developed over years or even decades to improve their yields, from the discovery of the chemical reaction or physico-chemical principle to the industrial process needed to yield commercial quantities. Starting with an introduction to process design, optimization, and safety, Martin then provides stand-alone chapters—in a case study fashion—for commercially important chemical production processes. Computational software tools like MATLAB®, Excel, and Chemcad are used throughout to aid process analysis. - Integrates principles of chemical engineering, unit operations, and chemical reactor engineering to understand process synthesis and analysis - Combines traditional computation and modern software tools to compare different solutions for the same problem - Includes historical perspectives and traces the improving efficiencies of commercially important chemical production processes - Features worked examples and end-of-chapter problems with solutions to show the application of concepts discussed in the text