Interesting assertion from the FAQ on Michael Laufer's website[1]:
> Q: What about quality control? A: It’s important to know that making small quantities of a chemical is vastly different than making it on an industrial scale. The chemistry isn’t even the same. This is a big reason why chemical engineering is an entire field of study. With smaller reactions, while you do have to be more precise in your measurements sometimes. There are fewer things to go wrong.
Why would making small quantities be vastly different than making it on an industrial scale?
I've heard the same thing about cooking and baking. Supposedly, if a recipe calls for 1 tablespoon of baking powder, then you scale it up 50 fold, you can't simply use 50 tablespoons of baking powder. The claim was that you had to use way more baking powder or much less (I forget which). It sounded like nonsense, but now I'm wondering.
The most obvious element is heat: heat production grows at the same rate as volume, but heat dissipation grows at the same rate as surface area. So larger scales invariably end up running hotter (particularly when energetic exothermic reactions are involved), and temperature plays a major role in the kinematics of chemical reactions.
The same surface area/volume issue in bulk also plays into reactions that happen at the margins of materials rather than the bulk--metal-catalyzed reactions are a common example.
For industrial scale, yield becomes an much more important concern. There are also physical considerations like the square-cube law.
I'm not a chemist but several times I've seen comments along the lines of "you can do this at home by doing (simple procedure), however in the industry, it is done like that (complex procedure)".
Large scale production has very different requirements than small scale synthesis in the lab. Getting rid of heat is much easier on a small scale, and not all methods that work on a small scale can be scaled up.
It's a ridiculous answer to the question of quality control, though. It doesn't really have anything to do with that.
I'm also curious about that, the only reason I can think would have to do with an incomplete reaction because of the size of the batch although that would mean the ability to mix a batch of X depended on the amount and I don't know why that would be.
> Q: What about quality control? A: It’s important to know that making small quantities of a chemical is vastly different than making it on an industrial scale. The chemistry isn’t even the same. This is a big reason why chemical engineering is an entire field of study. With smaller reactions, while you do have to be more precise in your measurements sometimes. There are fewer things to go wrong.
Why would making small quantities be vastly different than making it on an industrial scale?
I've heard the same thing about cooking and baking. Supposedly, if a recipe calls for 1 tablespoon of baking powder, then you scale it up 50 fold, you can't simply use 50 tablespoons of baking powder. The claim was that you had to use way more baking powder or much less (I forget which). It sounded like nonsense, but now I'm wondering.
[1] https://fourthievesvinegar.org/faq