A manufacturing process in which the reactants are fed into the process in fixed quantities (batches), rather than in a continuous flow. At any particular instant all the material, from its preparation to the final product, has reached a definite stage in the process. Baking a cake is an example of a batch process. Such processes present problems of automation and instrumentation and tend to be wasteful of energy. For this reason, batch processing is only economically operated on an industrial scale when small quantities of valuable or strategic materials are required, e.g. drugs, titanium metal.
