Product Design

A good design is both art and science. Creativity is needed to come up with a product concept that has either not been considered before or has been considered and abandoned. Discipline is needed to investigate and evaluate all the details to make sure that they fit together, which is an exercise in multiscale optimization: the product structure is in the molecular scale of nanometers to micrometers, the process equipment is in centimeter to meter scales, marketing and finance are played in the meter to hundred kilometer scales, and environmental concerns are on a global scale. The work of product innovation usually involves a discovery phase followed by a development phase, which was described at the end of Chapter 2. Some of the work involved can be described as: 1. identifying customer needs and technological capabilities; 2. generating a number of broad ideas and concepts for products and processes; 3. investigating and solving problems encountered in customer needs and plant operations; 4. evaluating alternate concepts, and selecting winning designs for commercialization; 5. drawing detailed designs and plans for the products and the processes. A design team is critical to the success of the innovation work, involving people from marketing and research, plus critical inputs from manufacturing and finance. In the narrow sense, the design team is concerned with the work in (5), in drawing detailed designs and plans for the products and the processes. In the broad sense, the work of design begins in (2) by generating concepts, and makes significant contributions in (4) when evaluating alternate concepts. The decision to commercialize involves the commitment of major financial and manpower resources, and usually involves a presentation of a business plan at a high-level meeting, such as with the executive committee of a company. Different authors have come up with a variety of ideas on the ideal organization and phases of the innovation work. Ulrich and Eppinger (2000) suggested a template that may be more appropriate for mechanical engineering products that do not require research breakthroughs. Cussler and Moggridge (2001) suggested a four-step schedule involving needs, ideas, selection, and manufacture.

Product Marketing

A marketer should follow the maxim of the 4th century BC strategist Sun-zi, who said “Know self, know opponents, hundred battles, hundred victories.” We are the chemical processing industries (CPI), which is a collection of firms that manufacture and sell a range of products that involve chemistry and employ many chemical engineers. The buyers are consumers, businesses, governments, and foreigners. When we consider selling a product to a buyer, we pay particular attention to profitable and growing markets where our product has a relative advantage over competition. It takes a bold pioneer to introduce a new product that requires the creation of a new market. Let us study the sellers of chemical products, which are collectively called the CPI. These manufacturers are skilled in the use of chemical reactions and separations to make their products, and they employ many chemical engineers and chemists, often in highly responsible positions. Many of the firms in the CPI are also our suppliers of raw materials and intermediates, our customers for our products, and our competition in making and selling their products. The Statistical Abstract of the United States is published annually by the U.S. Census Bureau, which groups all the economic activities in the United States into 11 divisions by the Standard Industrial Classification (SIC). The manufacturing division is divided into 20 sections designated by two-digit numbers. The manufacturers that involve chemistry intensively are listed in table 9.1, by two 2-digit numbers, such as: 20 Food, 28 Chemicals, and 29 Petroleum Refining. The table lists the number of establishments, the number of employees and value of shipment in 1996. The SIC 28, “Chemical and Allied Products,” is the basic supplying industry to the other sectors. Table 9.1 also gives the subdivision of SIC 28 into three-digit subsectors, such as: 281 Industrial Inorganics, 283 Drugs, and 286 Industrial Organics. The subsectors of 281 and 286 form the core of the Chemical and Allied Products, as they provide raw material and intermediates for the rest of the subsectors, such as 282 Plastics and 287 Agricultural chemicals.

Predictions by Correlations

After searching the literature and making predictions based on theory without getting sufficient satisfactory results, the next move would be to make estimates. We need the property y of substances pi from a population P that has not been investigated and reported in the literature. Fortunately, there exists a subset S of P that has been investigated, and we have the values for the property y. For instance, we may want the boiling points of all the hydrocarbons, but we have only the boiling points of the normal paraffins from 1 to 20 carbon atoms. Can we use this piece of information on normal paraffins to estimate the boiling points for the rest of the hydrocarbon population? How much effort would be involved and how accurate would the results be? The number of isomers of paraffin is very large; see table 5.1. We see that the iso-paraffins are not as well investigated as the normal paraffins. We have the boiling points of all three isomers of pentane, but not the 75 isomers of decane. It is inevitable that we have to resort to estimations. When we have obtained a good correlation for normal paraffins, we would naturally want to know if we can extend this to the branched paraffins, and onward to the population of all the saturated hydrocarbons (by including the cyclic paraffins), and onward to the population of all hydrocarbons (by including olefins, acetylenes, and aromatic compounds), and then onward to the population of all organic compounds (by including compounds with heteroatoms, such as O, N, Cl). A correlation that applies accurately to a larger domain is more useful than one that works only for a smaller domain. Another example is polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs), which have 10 hydrogen atoms that can be substituted by chlorine atoms. There are three types of site: the four α sites near the bridge between the two phenyl fragments, the four β sites farther away from the bridge, and the two γ sites that are the farthest away from the bridge. The number of isomers is shown in table 5.2.

Search Challenges and Methods

A successful product must have the following elements: a market and customers with needs for a product that is available in quantity and at suitable prices, with a set of properties that are suitable for the application, containing appropriate material that can be produced by a suitable technology. The design of a successful product for the marketplace can be described as the creative synthesis of many elements together, with optimization and harmony. The product innovators usually start with some of the required elements, but other key elements are missing and have to be found: for example, when we needed a good refrigerant but did not know what material would have the right properties, or when we found an interesting nonstick polymer but did not know what products would benefit from it and what markets would appreciate it. At later stages, we need to find ways to optimize the elements to make a better product, such as by learning to make nylon from the raw materials adipic acid and hexamethylenediamine, and by increasing the solubility of taxol by emulsifying with castor oil. Thus, a successful design involves many searches for missing elements, as well as for ways to improve existing elements. The search from a material to its properties is called the forward search, since handbooks and tables of properties are organized and listed by the materials, so one looks up the boiling points and the flammability of the compounds by their names. The invention of nylon by Carothers and associates at DuPont in 1928 can be represented by the set of arrows from the left to the right in figure 3.1. Carothers discovered the science and technology of condensation polymerization, which has the capability to make polyester material in possession of properties that are promising but not entirely suitable, as well as the capability to make many other materials. They decided that the product should be a silken fiber, suitable for the market of ladies stockings. From this “lead compound,” they searched to find ways to modify the structure to obtain material with superior and desirable properties that were fine-tuned for the stocking market.

Product Exploration and Discovery

It is sometimes said that “necessity is the mother of invention.” Many product innovations have begun with the observation and recognition that many people are in need of a new or improved product, and investigators then looked for a technology that would produce such a product to satisfy this market need. Investigators may examine current products to find what properties need improvement and whether these properties can be modified; for example, raw rubber is brittle when cold and is sticky when hot, whereas vulcanized rubber, which is used to make tires and gaskets, remains flexible whether hot or cold. Investigators may take the more ambitious approach of looking for materials that are not currently used for a particular product to see whether they have better properties to offer: for example, the use of ether as an anesthetic relieved the pain from surgery and childbirth that people were subjected to previously. The more ambitious investigator would attempt to create new synthetic materials to suit a particular market: Freon, a chlorofluorocarbon (CFC), was invented to make a safe refrigerant for home refrigerators. These are called the Market-Pull products, or market looking for a technology. Another frequent innovation path begins with a technology that is dormant or underutilized, followed by the search for new markets. When Freon was established as a safe refrigerant, it became the platform for new markets, such as air conditioning, aerosol propellants, and computer cleaning. Some technologies began as accidental discoveries when investigators were looking for something else, or were driven by curiosity. Penicillin is one of the best known examples of serendipity, of making unexpected discoveries. The most ambitious paths start from planned explorations to create a new technology, followed by the quest for a place in the market. Carothers created the field of synthetic condensation polymerization, and DuPont decided that this method could be used to make nylon fibers to replace silk stockings. These are called the Technology-Push products, or technology looking for a market.

Product Innovation Opportunities

There is an endless list of exciting new products that are waiting to be invented, developed, and introduced to the marketplace, which would bring honor and profit to the innovators. We will discuss in this chapter some of the methods to identify the most exciting challenges and some of the most tantalizing targets. What is a good target? An investigator should begin by making a self-examination on what are the internal competitive strengths of this individual or organization as the starting point. The internal competitive strength may be the ability to make keen observations on a market segment and its unsatisfied needs, plus the ability to connect with potential technological solutions; it may be the possession of a unique technological capability, or the observation of an underutilized technology. A good product development project should also have a large and profitable market that is growing, should have barriers of entry (such as patents) against imitators for a period of time, and should not have safety or environmental problems. In Chapter 1, we discussed historic product innovations, both motivated by external market-pull and by internal technology-push motivations. Figure 12.1 shows a quadrant that was popularized by the Boston Consulting Group as the “stars and dogs” chart, and later popularized by Donald Stokes as Pasteur’s quadrant. The horizontal axis shows the strength of external market-pull, and the vertical axis shows the level of internal technology-push. The lower right quadrant represents market needs that are not matched by adequate technology, and the upper left quadrant represents technical capabilities that are not matched by adequate market demand. The mission of product innovation is to find ways to go from these two quadrants to the upper right quadrant, which is the promised land combining high external need with high internal capabilities, and a wonderful place to do business. We ignore the dog in the lower left quadrant. Marketing people pay attention to major market trends in the world, as well as individual segments of opportunity. The normal assignment of a research and development organization in a manufacturing company is innovations in response to market needs in the current product areas.

Safety, Health, and Environment

There was a time when the primary concerns of the product engineers were the needs of the buyers and consumers of their products, and they concentrated most of their efforts on design and manufacture of products with the goal of meeting their requirements and approval. A product will certainly fail if it does not have the steady and continued confidence of the consumers. The CPI, just like any other industry at that time, were accountable mostly to the consumers. This was a two-party transaction, where the buyer gave the seller money in return for a satisfactory product. This form of two-party transaction is no longer valid, as there are many bystanders whose welfare can be damaged in the transaction and their welfare must also be safeguarded. The manufacturing and marketing of chemical products is now a multiparty transaction, as the public and the governments have forcefully placed themselves into part of the bargain. The product engineers must become cradle-to-grave stewards of their products, and must solve many safety and environmental problems: from the extraction of raw material from farms and mines, to transportation on land and over water, to manufacturing in plants, to use in the customers hands, and finally to recycle back to nature. Before you begin to design the product, you need to focus your attention on the customer and their needs, but you also need to focus your attention on the potential hazards that the product poses to the safety and health of your workforces and the neighbors, and to the environment. You need some familiarity with the history of past mistakes, with the current government regulations, and with methods to deal with these potential problems. Over a long period of history, commercial transactions were primarily a two-party affair, between the seller and the buyer. In the last few decades, a third party has forcefully entered into the transaction, based on concerns about safety and the environment, and on public opinion and government regulations. This is shown in figure 10.1.

Theory and Quantitative Predictions

The purpose of this chapter is to review the theories of molecular structure and property relations, to discuss computational methods for prediction of molecular structure and properties, and to discuss some of the properties that can be predicted by computations. Quantum mechanics is the foundation of molecular structure and properties. The position and energy of the electrons around a molecule are determined by solving the Schrödinger equation for a given set of positions of the nuclei of the atoms. There is a lot of powerful and effective computer software that can be used to calculate many of the properties of an isolated single molecule, especially at zero absolute temperature. The starting point is the construction of the sketch of a molecule by connecting atoms with the appropriate bonds. This qualitative sketch does not need accurate values for the bond lengths and angles. To set up the computation, the investigator specifies one of three computation methods: ab initio, semi-empirical, or molecular mechanics. The first and second methods are based on quantum mechanics about a model of the molecule as a number of negatively charged electrons surrounding a collection of positively charged nuclei. The third option of molecular mechanics is based on classical Newtonian mechanics about a model of the molecule as a number of mechanical bonds linking the atoms together, and these bonds can be stretched and bent according to empirical force fields. When either the Schrödinger equation or the Newtonian equation is solved with the initial spatial distribution of nuclei, in what is called the single-point determination, the binding energy of the molecule is obtained. If we make random perturbations of the positions of the various atoms, and repeat the single-point calculations, we can map the energy levels of the molecule in a neighborhood. The most stable or equilibrium position of the molecule is the one with the lowest energy in the neighborhood, and the search for this equilibrium position of the atoms is called geometry optimization. The most rigorous and accurate method of calculation is the ab initio method, which is also the most demanding in computational time and resources, so that it is most often used for smaller molecules.

Product Development to Business

Many historians and journalists conclude an exciting story of innovation at the discovery phase, when there emerges a plausible idea of a new product. However, for most innovative products, the exciting story has barely begun. Usually, many years of hard work still lie ahead, to modify and adapt the technology to the needs of the marketplace, and to find solutions to many problems. Sometimes, the development work is accomplished mainly inside a single organization, such as in the development of nylon by DuPont; at other times, the development work is accomplished by many units under a loose network of cooperation, such as in the development of penicillin and of taxol by numerous companies and organizations. The innovation project will not go forth unless sponsors can be found and persuaded that the product can be manufactured from available technology and raw materials, accepted in the marketplace as superior in quality to other products at a competitive price, acceptable in safety and environmental concerns, and make a handsome profit for the manufacturer. The critical go-ahead signal is in obtaining finance to pay for the capital cost of land, building, and equipment, as well as the working capital cost of hiring management and staff, buying raw materials, and paying for utility and transportation. Other major landmarks are the start-up of the first manufacturing plant and the initial product offer in the market. If the product is to remain viable in the marketplace for many years, then there must be vigilance in monitoring the reactions of the customers, as well as that of the competition and the government, and taking appropriate actions. The development stories of numerous products are not well recorded or are completely lost. We are grateful that there are a few stories that have received attention from the innovators who took pains to record their stories. The book Science and Corporate Strategy: DuPont R&D, 1902–1980 by Hounshell and Smith (1988) presents a well-documented story of the long journey of nylon from discovery to the marketplace. A large number of people were involved.

Random Searches

The reverse search starts from a set of desired properties and asks for substances that possess them. Theoretical knowledge and past experience should be relied upon to suggest where to look, since it is the fastest and least expensive approach. When theoretical knowledge and past experience have been exhausted, then random searches may be the only way to make progress, if the problem is sufficiently important and there is enough budget and patience. Table 7.1 compares some of the requirements and the pros and cons of the guided search and the random search The best strategy on how to spend resources of time and money most efficiently can be considered a problem in operations research, under the topic of “optimal resource allocation.” The best way to use the limited resources of money and time effectively may be a mixed strategy, with some guided and some random searches. Even a random search has to start somewhere. At the beginning, there should be a plan on what territories to cover and how to cover them. The plan can be deterministic, which is completely planned out in advance and executed accordingly. The plan can also be adaptive: after the arrival of each batch of results and preliminary evaluations, the plan would evolve to take advantage of the new information and understanding gained. Even a random search must begin at a starting point and stake out the most promising directions for initial explorations. In most cases, there is a lead compound that has some of the desired properties, but which is deficient in others, and serves as the starting point of the random search to find better compounds in this neighborhood. The historic cases in section 1.2 involve the modification of an existing product, such as vulcanizing raw rubber and adding an acetyl group to salicylic acid. One explores around the lead compound by using small amounts of additives, blending with other material, changing processing conditions and temperature, and changing structure by chemical reactions.