Inorganic chemistry is fairly simple and fun as long as you keep it in the lab. Industrial-scale inorganic chemistry gets ridiculously complicated because all the reactants and products are complicated and messy. Also, a large reactor will have all sorts of gradients, which means that the reactions take place in unfavourable conditions all the time. None of it is ideal, and none of it follows simplified laws or rules very well.

Sure, we have all sorts of fancy calculations, but none of them predict very accurately what’s going to happen and when. Even the best models and theories give approximate and crude answers when you’re dealing with messy industrial-scale chemistry.

Models give you a rough idea, lab experiments give you a decent idea, but running the process at full scale is the only way to find out exactly how those reactions really work in real life.

Turns out, our theories are too simple to handle complicated solutions. They can predict the behaviour of simple solutions very well, but that’s not good enough. In real life, you rarely have well behaved clean reagents.

[–] anonymouse2@sh.itjust.works 2 points 1 day ago (1 children)

This comment is chilling. Makes me think we should be thankful that chem plants aren't just constantly going boom.

[–] Hamartiogonic@sopuli.xyz 1 points 1 day ago

Dangers like that can be identified quite easily. It's a qualitative thing, and qualitative chemistry is pretty robust. For instance, we can say that there's a risk that a particular reaction will produce hydrogen under specific circumstances. We'll just build the plant accordingly instead of trusting that we can always operate the plant correctly. Sooner or later, you'll end up running the plant in the wrong way, and you'll produce some hydrogen, so it's good to have a plant that can detect and deal with it safely.

However, usually the idea is to produce something entirely different, and do so efficiently. Those sorts of questions are quantitative, and that's where things can and will go wrong all the time. Like, how do you ensure that your expensive catalyst isn't covered in goo, or corrosion doesn't eat your fancy impeller? How do you ensure that the amount of impurities in the product will remain reasonably low? It's all about the quantities and reaction rates, and that's the hard part with inorganic chemistry.