Abstract
Basic chemicals are the orphans of the chemical industry. They are not glamorous, like drugs, and are sometimes not very profitable (and at the very least the profits come in unpredictable cycles of boom and bust). They are not seen or used directly by the general public and so their importance is not often understood. Even within the industry their importance is often insufficiently appreciated. Without them, however, the rest of the industry could not exist.
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Bibliography and recommended reading
A very useful one-volume reference work which covers a vast variety of industrial chemical processes (though it has a disturbing number of typographical and trivial errors) is: ‘Survey of Industrial Chemistry,’ Philip J. Chenier, Wiley Interscience, 1986.
The key reference source for the details of processes and end uses is: ‘Ullmann’s Encyclopedia of Industrial Chemistry,’ Barbara Elvers et al., eds, 25 vols, VCH.
Up-to-date information about the industry can be found in various journals such as: Chemistry and Industry (published every two weeks, good on UK & European news and general industry information); European Chemical News, Chemical Week (both good for general industry information; Chemical and Engineering News (very good on collected statistics, but biased to USA data).
A useful—though very detailed and technical—guide to some specific manufacturers’ processes is: ‘Handbook of Chemical Production Processes’, Robert A. Meyers, McGraw-Hill, 1986.
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© 1994 Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht
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Black, S. (1994). The sulphur, phosphorus, nitrogen and chlor-alkali industries. In: Heaton, A. (eds) The Chemical Industry. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-011-1318-2_6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-011-1318-2_6
Publisher Name: Springer, Dordrecht
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