Designing Chemical Products Requires More Knowledge of Perception E.L. Cussler and Andrew Wagner Chemical Engineering and Materials Science, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, MN 55455 Laurent Marchal-Heussler Ecole Nationale Superiere des Industries Chemie, ENSIC-LSGC, Universite de Nancy, France DOI 10.1002/aic.12174 Published online January 7, 2010 in Wiley InterScience (www.interscience.wiley.com). Keywords: design, products, perception, texture Introduction T here are three main types of chemical products. The first, commodities, is developed on the basis of cost: the lowest cost producer tends to dominate the mar- ket. The second type, molecular products, is exemplified by pharmaceuticals, discovered and developed quickly. The third type of product, often called ‘‘performance products’’, has added value because of its function. This function fre- quently is a consequence of the product’s microstructure. The key step in the design of these products differs widely. For commodity products, the key step is manufac- ture, because manufacture dominates the final product price. For molecular products, the key step for development is dis- covery, a step normally based in chemistry. For performance products, the key step is identification of product need, rewritten as quantitative technical specifications. Identifying the need for a performance product depends on how this need is expressed. When the need can be expressed in physical or chemical terms, performance prod- uct design is similar to other product types. When the need is expressed as a consumer attribute, like ‘‘smooth’’, ‘‘clean’’, or ‘‘tender’’, design is complicated by the incom- plete understanding of human perception. Background To justify these assertions, we remember that the chemical industry has been dominated by the production of commod- ity chemicals. These chemicals, produced in amounts of over 10,000 tons per year, are made in equipment explicitly developed for that single product. Such dedicated commodity chemical manufacture has, over the past 50 years, been opti- mized to produce high-purity chemicals as cheaply as possi- ble. This optimization is one reason that the chemical indus- try has been successful. Because over 30 million chemicals are known, we can easily forget how few chemicals are actually produced in such large amounts. Some of these are shown in Figure 1. This graph shows the value of the chemical business on the ordinate, and the description of specific compounds on the abscissa. What is impressive about this graph is how quickly it levels off. Only about 50 or so chemicals actually have yearly sales of over a billion dollars. We do not pretend that smaller sales of chemicals are not important: we are rou- tinely startled by chemicals made in very small quantities which sell for several hundred million dollars per year. Our point is that the number of chemicals actually made in dedi- cated equipment and in large quantities is actually about 50. Demand for these products is growing, but only roughly in proportion to the world’s population. Nonetheless, significant growth is still occurring in the chemical business. This growth is not in the commodity area but in more valuable products made in smaller amounts. This is evidenced by the jobs taken by new chemical engi- neering graduates. Thirty years ago, three quarters of those graduates went to work for the commodity chemical busi- nesses, for companies like BASF, Dupont, and Dow. Now, only about one-third of graduates go to work for this type of company. Similarly, 30 years ago, only about 15% of gradu- ating chemical engineers went to work for companies which added major value to the cost of their raw materials in mak- ing specialty products. 3M, Pfizer, Intel and Nestle are examples. Today, almost half of new graduates go to such companies. Product Characteristics To explore this change in more detail, we must define more carefully what we mean by chemical products. One definition idealizes them as three different types: Perspective Based on Keynote Lecture presented by E.L. Cussler at the 8th World Congress of Chemical Engineering in Montreal, Canada; August 24th, 2009. E.L. Cussler’s e-mail address is cussl001@umn.edu. V V C 2010 American Institute of Chemical Engineers AIChE Journal 283 February 2010 Vol. 56, No. 2