Introduction

Batch processes have been around for many millennia, probably since the beginning of human civilization. Cooking, bread making, tanning, and wine making are some of the batch processes that humans relied upon for survival and pleasure. The term “batch process” is often used to refer generically to both batch and fed-batch operations. In the former case, all ingredients used in the operation are fed to the processing vessel at the beginning of the operation and no addition or withdrawal of material takes place during the batch run. In the latter, material can be added during the batch run. For brevity, the term batch is used in this text to refer to both batch and fed-batch operations when there is no need to distinguish between them. The term fed-batch is used to denote addition of material in some portions of an otherwise batch operation.