C3d

Question 1

What are the disadvantages and advantages of batch production?

Answer 1

-disadvantages:labour intensive (equipment needs to e set up, manually controlled and cleaned out at the ends), tricky to keep quality the same batch to batch
-advantages: flexible (several different products can be made using same equipment), start-up costs
relatively low (small scale, multi-purpose equipment can be bought off shelf)

Question 2

What are disadvantages and advantages of continuous production?

Answer 2

• advantages: quality of product very consistent, runs automatically, (only need to interfere if something goes wrong)
• disadvantage: start-up costs to build plant are huge , not cost-effective unless running at full capacity

Question 3

What is batch production and who uses it?

Answer 3

• operates at certain times
• often used to make pharmaceutical drugs as they are complicated to make and in fairly low demand, it is the most cost effective way to produce small quantities of drugs to order

Question 4

What is continuous production and who uses it?

Answer 4

• runs all the time
• large-scale industrial manufacture
• production never stops, so no time wasted emptying reactor and setting it up again

Question 5

Why do pharmaceutical drugs cost a lot of money?

Answer 5

• research and development: finding suitable a compound, testing it, modifying it, testing again, until its ready (involves lots of work of highly paid scientists)
• trailing: all drugs must go through time-consuming tests including human and animal trials, manufacturer has to prove the drug meets legal requirements so it works and is safe
• manufacture: multi-step batch production is labour-intensive and can’t be automated, other costs include energy and raw materials. Raw materials used for pharmaceutical drugs are often rare and sometimes need to be extracted from plants (expensive process)

Question 6

How does extracting materials from plants work?

Answer 6

• crush
• boil and dissolve in suitable solvent
• separate through chromatography
• extract the chemical you want

Question 7

How can you test for purity?

Answer 7

• pure substances won’t separate by chromatography (stays one blob)
• pure substances have specific melting points and boiling points. Impure substances’ melting point may be too low, and boiling point to high