Chemical firms see no recovery in near future

Economic standards in 1982 are such that optimists in the chemical in­dustry had hoped just to find a low point in the recession in the first quarter. Considerations of recovery were for later in the year.

It now looks as if even this mod­est forecast was on the high side. Sources in basic chemicals on the Gulf Coast knew in January that their business volume was still slid­ing. Prices were a good barometer, registering steep discounts of up to one third for many large-volume basic chemicals and polymers.

As the first quarter comes to a close, no one is yet sure that the recession's low point is past. The flattening effect industry people have been looking for has not shown up in any measurable way.

Warning flags are out on first-quarter earnings. At Hercules' an­nual stockholders meeting last week in Wilmington, Del., president Al­exander F. Giacco reported that the first quarter is getting off to a slow start in earnings, although sales are expected to be higher than in fourth-quarter 1981.

As to when the economic dip will end, Giacco sounds like industry an­

alysts at the end of last year, saying, in effect, "Wait one more quarter." He speculates that, if the end of the recession arrives by mid-year, 1982 would be a mirror image of 1981, with quarter-to-quarter improvements, especially in the second half.

So the spring promises a waiting game in chemicals. About the only thing companies can do at the mo­ment is watch for confirmation of the industry's miserable first quar­ter in official data. The Federal Re­serve Board's production indexes for January do just that. For chemicals and allied products, January produc­tion sank another 3% month-to-month, the same rate as in Decem­ber, putting the industry's physical output 12% lower than a year before.

Unfortunately, January produc­tion was worst in the part of the chemical industry closest to retail markets. Production will have to turn up in these markets before the re­cession can end. For synthetic ma­terials (polymers), the Federal Re­serve Board finds a 7% month-to-month production drop in January, again the same rate as in December. Polymers' physical volume in Janu­ary was off a brutal 25% from a year before. In basic chemicals, produc­tion was stabler, about even with December but down 17% from Jan­uary 1981. D

Shuttle's third mission scheduled this week

Barring mechanical mishaps and in­clement weather, the space shuttle orbiter Columbia is flying its third mission this week. At press time, the seven-day flight, during which a number of space environment exper­iments will be performed, was sched­uled for launch from Kennedy Space Center, Fla., on March 22.

The launch decision was compli­cated by a freakish, late winter storm that soaked the normally dry lake bed at Edwards Air Force Base in southern California, the shuttle's usual landing site. National Aero­nautics & Space Administration of­ficials were evaluating the conditions at Edwards and the possibility of moving the primary landing site to White Sands, N.M., before confirm­ing the launch date.

The mission is the third of four planned orbital test flights and NASA scientists and engineers will be playing catch-up to a certain ex­tent. Columbia's second flight was marred by malfunction of one of its three fuel cells, forcing the prema­ture landing of the orbiter. -

The orbiter flight scheduled this week will continue the engineering shakedown of the shuttle, with em­phasis on measuring the thermal re­sponses of the spacecraft during long periods of various attitudes toward the sun.

Also receiving attention on this flight will be the Canadian-built pay-load deployment and retrieval sys­tem—the robot arm that deploys ex­periments and satellites from the shuttle's cargo bay. On this flight it will lift two instrument packages from the bay to sample the space environment around the shuttle and return them to the bay for the trip back to Earth.

Eleven experiments and investiga­tions will be conducted. Among them:

• Contamination monitor package developed at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center is designed to meas­ure the buildup of shuttle-generated molecular and gas contamination on surfaces in the payload bay.

• Microabrasion foil experiment developed at the University of Kent, U.K., will measure the number, chemistry, and density of microme-teorites encountered by the shuttle in its near-Earth orbit.

• Plant-growth unit developed at the University of Houston is de­signed to demonstrate the effect of

March 22, 1982 C&EN 9

Powerful magnet ready for test use Initial testing of what Argonne National Laboratory says is the most powerful pulsed, superconducting magnet to be built has been completed by scientists at the lab, located near Chicago. Here, the 2-foot-long by 3-foot-diameter unit is being prepared for installation in the container that will hold the liquid he­lium bath to provide superconducting temperatures. The magnet produces field pulses as high as 6.2 tesla in one second. It will be used in Argonne's pulsed cable test facility to test new cables that could be used in coils of future, larger magnetic fusion reactors. In fact, it is a newly designed cable that has led to the successful design of the present magnet. Large pulses, researchers at Argonne explain, exert great force on the magnet, threaten­ing to burst it apart or to heat it so that it no longer operates efficiently. To overcome these difficulties, Argonne scientists designed a cable that con­sists of multiple strands of copper and a niobium-titanium alloy, twisted around an insulated strip made of stainless steel.