ACHEMA accord

If nothing else, the triennial Achema exhibition does reassure chemical engineers that perhaps they did, after all, make the right career decision. The sheer scale of the event is such that any one hall (out of the dozen or so in use) would more than match many of the industry-specific exhibitions that UK engineers are used to.

The focus at Frankfurt is mainly on the chemical industry, but the diversity of roles filled in other industries by chemical and process engineers is also well represented - from environmental engineering, through safety and loss prevention, to materials handling. Whatever the interest, there is a part of Achema dedicated to it.

In environmental engineering, for example, over a thousand exhibitors (out of the record total of 3697) had something to offer by way of technologies, products or services. These ranged from new thermal and catalytic processes for cleaning up exhaust gases (both industrial and automotive) to novel biological processes for cleaning waste gases in the chemical industry.

Biotechnology has in fact been a significant feature of Achema for some time now, and this year the number of relevant exhibitors had increased by over 40 per cent on 1994 to 863 in total. And with more than 200 companies representing the pharmaceutical sector, the biotech trend was plain to see.

It is, of course, virtually impossible to review an Achema, unless the focus is so narrow that the benefits of the show's scale are totally lost.

Here then, by way of pictures and a few, far too few, words are just some of our impressions. They might not necessarily be the same as those of other visitors - but when they numbered a record 229,000 from 95 countries, that's hardly surprising.