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This book, a result of knowledge exchange between the academic and industrial worlds, aims to introduce process industries to students, teachers, researchers, professionals, decision-makers, and, in general, the general public, at a time when they are affected by the digital revolution that accompanies the ongoing energy and environmental transitions.

These industries aim to transform and/or separate matter by chemical, physical or biological means. They cover huge and often complex fields such as chemistry, petroleum, pharmaceuticals, cosmetics, metallurgy, food industry, biotechnology, environmental and energy industries, among others. Their economic and societal importance is considerable.

These companies create value through their products from industrial facilities (workshops, factories) that implement specific technologies and processes. The science enabling this implementation is called “chemical engineering” (génie des procédés in French).

The French name is to be credited to the late Professor Jacques Villermaux of the École nationale supérieure des industries chimiques (ENSIC, the French National School of Chemical Industries) in Nancy, who noted that all the knowledge and techniques of chemical engineering could be perfectly applied, beyond the chemical and petroleum industries, to all process industries.

This book is an invitation to discover the operational modes and technical and industrial management of these industries. It attempts to succinctly answer the following questions:

Introduction written by Jean-Pierre Dal Pont and Marie Debacq.

1 – What is a company?

2 – What are its foundations and how is it organized?

3 – How does it respond to what is today known as CSR (corporate social responsibility)?

4 – How does it cooperate with its stakeholders (clients, stockholders, employees, administration, etc.) when the concept of capitalism with a human face is born which, in addition to remunerating its shareholders, wants to display its contribution to the common good?

5 – How does it design its commercial products based on the results of its research?

6 – How does it build and manage its plants and factories to manufacture and distribute its products, after having assessed their impact on the environment through an eco-design analysis based on LCA (Life cycle Assessment)?

7 – What are the scientific bases and the “technological elements” that the chemical engineer, at the heart of the process, will use to design and operate the manufacturing facility?

To ensure their sustainability, process companies must adapt to their socioeconomic environment, and, more particularly, to the society they shape through their innovations and products. In particular, they can help respond to the major challenges of today’s world, such as that of population growth: if we believe the forecasts, there will be two billion more people to feed by 2050. Growing urbanization will also create quickly insurmountable problems if they are not managed now: a city like Chongqing, on the banks of the Yangtze, has a population that represents half of the population of France. The concepts of Smart Cities and Smart Buildings are therefore essential. As for climate change, this is perhaps the biggest challenge on the planet: the water stress associated with it will affect at least 17 countries, including India. Water is life!

Added to this is the fact that the increasingly enlightened consumer wants to know what they have on their plate, to be informed about the origin of the products they use. Traceability, authentication, naturalness, fair trade, etc. are concepts that manufacturers can no longer ignore. For example, the world is worried about the future of plastics: The Great Pacific Garbage Patch and the North Atlantic Garbage Patch¹, which are several times the size of France, are dumbfounding.

1 Continents of plastic floating on the oceans, sheltering an aquatic fauna that feeds on it and enters the food chain.

This book is particularly interested in the industrial facility at the center of the company. The future of it will depend heavily on its design and its technical and human implementation. Manufacturing operations are no longer considered dirty jobs; it is a given that wealth is built in the workshop (or on the shop floor). Thus, Toyotism, also called “lean manufacturing”, is there to prove it: this production system has enabled Toyota to create an empire in the automotive industry and surpass the Americans in their own country.

In recent years, the digital revolution has brought about a radical change (disruption) at the societal level and at the level of companies, both at the managerial and productive levels. It was made possible by the increased power of computers (Moore’s law), by the multiplication of sensors, their miniaturization, their low cost, and the development of algorithms. The notion of artificial intelligence (AI), which brings together a set of computer applications and algorithms based on the processing and exploitation of Big Data, testifies to this industrial revolution in progress. AI modifies our lives, our professions, our way of moving, very often, of taking care of ourselves, without our being aware of it. This term pervades books, articles, speeches and private and government research programs. Smartphones and tablets, which are only about 10 years old, are one of the essential pieces of media of this revolution. Who could do without it today?

In addition to AI, the digital revolution has brought with it a number of digital tools that underpin the concept of the factory of the future, born in Germany under the name “factory 4.0”. The factory of the future combines the virtual world with the real world. These tools include the IoT (Internet of Things) - everything is connected and everything is connectable - virtual reality, augmented reality, digital twins, additive manufacturing (3D printers), etc. The world of work is deeply affected by robotics and cobotics. We must expect an industry to emerge where repetitive, tiring, messy and even dangerous tasks will be eliminated. The operator will be more of a supervisor than a performer.

Added to this is the fact that the concept of sustainable development, the basis of CSR, is now mature, including the need for metrics. Industry is moving towards a circular, low-carbon and, no doubt, decentralized economy. Bio-industries are not immune to this development with the development of synthetic biology, a remarkable future technological tool, but subject to controversy from the ethical standpoint.

In this shifting context, it is therefore difficult to grasp what the evolution of employment will be; dignified roles are created (Data Officer), while subordinate tasks are on the way out.

Are we moving towards a civilization of algorithms? Their opacity raises fears of the advent of a “Black Box Society” where individual freedom is in danger. Everything is known, everything can be known! Our societies - already based on science, technology and knowledge - will become increasingly connected and undoubtedly more complex and more vulnerable.

GAFA (Google, Apple, Facebook, and Amazon), the most powerful digital Internet companies in the world, are already frightening with their capital power, supranationality, and speed of deployment. In this global technological race where everything is accelerating, China has now entered the fray and faces the United States.

These are the reflections that this work invites us to. This book hopes to be interactive and accessible for everyone; it refers to illustrative videos and presents concrete examples, offered by leading figures in the form of boxes. These are listed at the end of each volume.

Videos

The following link to a website makes it easy to access the resources that illustrate this work, in particular, the videos:

https://frama.link/livreIndustriesProcedes

The links and videos are classified by volume and by chapter (via the menu on the left) in the order of appearance in the book.

Volume 1: Sustainability, Managerial and Scientific Fundamentals

Chapter 1: Industries, Businesses and People (Jean-Pierre Dal Pont): this first chapter is devoted to the industry and the businesses that depend on it. It focuses on process industries, while highlighting what differentiates them from the manufacturing and service industries. The themes concerning their constitution, strategy, functioning and governance are discussed.

Chapter 2: Earth, Our Habitat: Products by the Millions, the Need for Awareness (Jean-Pierre Dal Pont and Michel Royer): dedicated to the relationship between products and the environment, this chapter initiates a reflection on our way of life. Earth, our habitat, is a finite space whose complex cycles depend on anthropic activities: we can cite, for example, atmospheric chemistry and the problem of ozone. The vital systems of water, food, energy and climate are referred to as a “nexus”, because they are interdependent. Products, whose quantity is increasing with the population explosion, must be ecodesigned using LCA (Lifecycle Assessment), toxicology, ecotoxicology and traceability studies, and turn to biobased raw materials. The circular economy must prevail over a linear economy, which consists of extracting, producing, consuming and throwing away.

Chapter 3: Designing Chemical Products (Willi Meier): Chapter 3 is dedicated to product design and formulation. A product must be designed to meet the needs of customers. In now saturated markets, companies are turning to often complex functionalized products. Post-its are a vivid example: at first, it was just a glue that stuck badly! Who could do without them today? Increasingly based on bio-sourced raw materials and biotechnologies, products use additives: ingredients such as starch and gelatin. This is the case for drugs that can also be encapsulated with alginates to reach the right target at the right time. The story of Aspirin^®, first synthesized by Bayer in 1897, is remarkable. Its survival is due, in part, to sophisticated formulations. Another example of the development of drinkable formulations is coffee. The formulation of environment-friendly “smart” products in the field of textiles or fertilizers, for example, is a science with a bright future.

Chapter 4: Chemical Engineering: Introduction and Fundamentals (Marie Debacq, Alain Gaunand and Céline Houriez): chemical engineering, although omnipresent, is almost unknown to the general public. The beginning of this chapter therefore endeavors to give some definitions and historical benchmarks about this young applied science. The fundamentals of chemical engineering are then presented: starting with thermodynamics, then transfers, and finally chemical kinetics and catalysis. The last part of the chapter presents the “system-balancesperformance” approach for process design using two simple examples. A box presents the very first level of calculation on processes, namely material balances.

Chapter 5: Chemical Engineering: Unit Operations (Marie Debacq): the concept of a unit operation has made it possible to bring together, in large categories, the innumerable equipment used by the process industries. There are numerous unit operations and there is no a question of giving an exhaustive presentation here. This chapter therefore covers some of them, chosen because they are particularly symbolic or representative of one type of operation or another. Thus, the following are presented: distillation, the most important separation operation and also certainly the most scientifically mature; some fluid/solid mechanical separation operations, very widespread industrially but still relatively empirical today; agitation, as a symbol of the importance of hydrodynamics (that is to say, the study of fluid movements) in chemical engineering; heat exchangers, the main representatives of transfer operations (heat exchangers dealing with the process of heat transfer); and, finally, reactors, which are at the heart of processes and responsible for the transformation of matter on the scale of the molecules themselves.

Volume 2: Industrial Management and the Digital Revolution

Chapter 1: Bio-industry in the Age of the Transition to Digital Technology: Significance and Recent Advances (Philippe Jacques): the digital revolution is profoundly changing the profession of engineers involved in bio-industries. This chapter describes the main stages of development of a product of microbial origin and how approaches related to bioinformatics, synthetic biology, systems biology and microfluidics will make it possible to amplify the development of this growing economic sector.

Chapter 2: Hydrogen Production by Steam Reforming (Marie Basin, Diana Tudorache, Matthieu Flin, Raphaël Faure and Philippe Arpentinier): this chapter presents the most widely used hydrogen production process in the world: steam reforming of natural gas. All the technological elements of this process are described, as are the problems of industrial operation of these units. Current and future developments, including those aimed at minimizing carbon dioxide emissions, are also discussed.

Chapter 3: Industrialization: From Research to Final Product (Jean-Pierre Dal Pont): the process includes all the technologies that plants and factories use to manufacture a product or a set of products. Very generally, this is a reaction followed by purification: a drug or a product to protect plants, often complex molecules, are the result of several reactions and several separations or purifications called “unit operations”, described elsewhere.

The purpose of this chapter is to describe the industrialization process, which, starting from research, will define the production tool. At the end of the chapter, two boxes describe the increasingly sought-after modular construction and the constraints and advantages of a multi-workshop platform.

Chapter 4: Operations (Jean-Pierre Dal Pont): operations, or manufacturing, designate the implementation of industrial facilities (plants or factories). They are an essential function of the process industries, the source of their products and related services, and, therefore, of their profit.

This chapter studies production, its flows (financial, information, materials), and the increasingly sophisticated IT tools that make it possible to manage them such as ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning). It also discusses the bases for calculating the cost price of products and margins. Finally, special thought is given to change management: to last is also to change.

Chapter 5: The Enterprise and The Plant of the Future at the Age of the Transition to Digital Technology (Jean-Pierre Dal Pont): Chapter 5 recalls the industrial revolutions that have followed one another since the invention of the steam engine, a source of energy at the beginning of the 18th Century, to the present day. It analyzes their impact on society and on the capital-intensive business as we know it today. Emphasis is placed on information technology, which took off after the Second World War. The emergence of the Internet around 1990, that of the smartphone around 2000, and the beginnings of artificial intelligence initiated the digital revolution, whose unprecedented impact we are already seeing on society and industry. Many boxes give examples of the use of AI in fields as varied as autonomous cars, underwater exploration, robotics and industrial management.

Chapter 6: And Tomorrow... (Jean-Pierre Dal Pont): this last chapter is a reflection on the digital revolution as it is perceived today and, more particularly, on artificial intelligence, which is its standard-bearing media. AI is increasingly affecting the city which wants to be smart. The water sector is taken as an example of economic activity whose digital aspect modifies the processes, the management of the distribution networks and the trades.

While the various applications of this emerging technology can hold out hope for many advances and improvements, the use of AI raises many questions. The very functioning of the industrial business is turned upside down. Will Teslism, synonymous with, among other things, the “hybridization” of computer systems, supplant Fordism? Isn’t the robot assisting the operator a threat to his job? The citizen, meanwhile, questions the intrusion of GAFA in his private life and governments about their supranationality. The “fully connected” raises fears for the fragility of administrative and industrial systems, while cybercrime is a ubiquitous threat. The fundamental question is whether human beings are at the heart of the system and... for how long.

In the current period of upheaval where “the only certainty is uncertainty”, perhaps we must take one of the thoughts of the great manager of the 20th Century, Peter Drucker: “The best way to predict the future is to create it.” One of the ambitions of this book is to help the readership in this research, or at least, to try to whet their curiosity.