Research and Development
A Definition

Edward T. Woodruff knows the world of Research and Development quite well having worked in it as an engineer for 34 years and 4 months.  This sheet is for your information, interest, and edification.  To learn more about our performance results and contributions please see Home and Accomplishments. 

Edward T. Woodruff has been in Research and Development essentially all the time at Grace Research.  After the Research Division closed we became a consultant.  Since that time (January 1997) we have been more involved as a chemical engineering consultant at the plant level in process design and production.

At Grace Research Edward T. Woodruff was involved in the D part of R&D as Research and Development is also called.  First this was in the Process Development Department.  In 1974 we formed the Engineering Consulting Department.  This latter department was also in development but much more so as from computations as opposed to experimental in Process Development.

Our view is that Research and Development is a vital part of any company's program.  Out of R and D, as it also is called, comes the products and products of the future for the company who practices it.

One of the problems of R&D is how to select projects for continued research and development.  On one hand there is the approach of the bench scale scientist to create products and promote them.  In this approach the commercial development function of R&D has to look into the marketplace and find applications that could benefit from the technology

One the other hand the commercial development function could identify market needs and trends.  They would have to find needs and market trends that are of future interest to the company.  From here such information would be passed onto research management to get research programs going to develop products designed to meet the identified market needs. 

There are the two basic parts to R&D (R and D).  The R part stands for the research component.  The D part refers to the development or process development component.  The R part is usually composed of research chemists,  The D part is usually composed of chemical engineers. 

As it turns out there is potential for conflict between the research chemists and the engineers.  The engineers have an eye toward commercial plant design and see the project through their own develop/design eyes.  The chemists see only their immediate bench scale work which is the most useful to them to do their innovative, patentable work.  The conflict arises because the R part does not understand why their technology can fall apart when the engineers from the D part scale it up to the pilot level.   The D part engineers know why  and tell the R part chemists so.

Over the years Edward T., Woodruff has developed the skill to motivate research people.  First of all they need all the encouragement they can get to do their job and create new products of future interest to the company.   However, the engineer, for example, needs reaction kinetics, thermodynamics, and physical properties of the various process streams for scale up and process design.  We have learned  how to get some of this information from the research people.  Also we have learned that the research folks can have good ideas about how to put the process together for the commercial plant.. 

According to http://en.wikipedia.org/Research_and_development. The US industrial companies spend 3.5% of their sales dollars on R&D.  A high tech company might spend 7%.  Others in the drug company arena spend 15%.  One biotech company spends 43.4%

Also see Accomplishments.