Reactor

1. Batch distillation
Batch distillation involves boiling and vaporizing, then cooling two liquids with different boiling points to create a highly concentrated product. Batch chemical processing, food and beverage, and pharmaceutical industries use this separation method the most compared to other distillation techniques.

Food and beverage manufacturers, for instance, use batch distillation to produce alcoholic beverages. Distillers pour a fermented grain and water mixture into a still or heating vessel to produce an alcohol-water mixture. They then raise the initial product's alcohol content through additional batch distillations and age it to create a final alcoholic beverage.

Pharmaceutical companies also use batch distillation to manufacture and check small quantities of drugs against product specifications and avoid producing large quantities of off-quality products.

2. Crystallization
Crystallization is the second most frequently used separation process after distillation. It involves removing the water-dissolved inorganic compounds of a liquid, solution, or gas to form a crystallized product. The solid result comprises an organized arrangement of molecules, ions, or atoms.

Process and pharmaceutical industries use this process to crystallize metal salts from highly concentrated solutions, treat wastewater, and remove free fluoride ions, calcium, magnesium, magnesium-ammonium, or potassium-magnesium phosphate. Crystallization is also a generic term for evaporative or cooling crystallization, precipitation, and melt crystallization.

3. Polymerization
Also known as polymer synthesis, polymerization combines monomers to produce polymers essential in making plastic products. Industrial polymer manufacturers use two classes of polymerization: condensation polymerization and addition polymerization.

Every step of the condensation polymerization process involves forming a molecule of simple compounds like water. Meanwhile, additional polymerization doesn't require by-products. It uses catalysts that control the structural details of monomers and, ultimately, affect the properties of polymers.

Industrial polymer manufacturers use different polymerization reactors, such as continuous, semi-batch, and batch reactors, in their production. They typically use batch reactors for small to intermediate batches of polymers or specialty grades. On the other hand, they use continuous reactors for large batches of commodity polymers such as polyolefins and high-impact polystyrene.

4. Hydrogenation
Food, petrochemical, and pharmaceutical industries use hydrogenation to process raw products, materials, or ingredients. They use nickel, platinum, and palladium catalysts to create the desired chemical reaction between molecular hydrogen and an element or compound. The process needs elevated temperatures and pressure to increase the hydrogen density and reaction rate.

Hydrogenated products include vegetable oil, ammonia, diesel, gasoline, isopropyl alcohol, drugs, margarine, polyols, various polymers, hydrogen chloride, and hydrogen peroxide.

5. Alkylation
Alkylation involves transferring an alkyl group from one molecule to another to produce petroleum. Here, the alkyl group turns into an alkyl carbocation, free radical, or carbanion.

This process also uses sulfuric or hydrofluoric acid catalysts to combine olefins with isobutane and create an alkylate product. The end product will have high-octane, branched-chain paraffin hydrocarbons that blend into a gasoline pool.