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Nachrichten, Termine, Experten
Nachrichten, Termine, Experten
The production of a wide range of chemical substances can be made more sustainable and cleaner through the use of light. In the EU project PROSPER, an international network of doctoral students, involving science and industry, is researching how photocatalytic processes can be scaled up for industrial application on a large scale. A digital kick-off event at the end of November marked the start of the project at Ulm University.
Globally, the chemical industry is responsible for around five percent of CO₂ emissions. Particularly high greenhouse gas emissions are generated when producing raw materials such as ethylene, propylene, benzene, methanol, or ammonia. "Greenhouse gas-neutral production of chemical products requires a lot of energy. One way to use renewable energies in production is to generate light for the manufacture of chemicals. However, scaling photocatalytic processes to an industrial scale remains a major challenge," explains Professor Dirk Ziegenbalg from the Institute of Chemical Engineering at Ulm University.
In photocatalysis, the energy of light is used for chemical processes to carry out energy-intensive reactions under "milder" reaction conditions—i.e., without high pressure or high temperatures. In this way, green electricity can be used for production and fossil fuels can be replaced. "Photochemical reactions are characterized by the fact that light opens up other reaction pathways. This means that molecules that would otherwise require several reactions can be produced in a single reaction," explains the chemical engineer. Photocatalytic reactions also eliminate the need for additives such as oxidizing agents, resulting in fewer by-products and less waste. For these reasons, they are often more sustainable than conventional thermal reactions.
To advance research into the industrial scaling of photocatalytic processes, the EU is now funding a transnational interdisciplinary doctoral network as a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Action with €2.3 million. Ten international partners are contributing their expertise to this project: six renowned research institutions and university institutes, as well as four companies from the chemical and process engineering sectors. Researchers, industry partners, and future doctoral students met at the digital kick-off event to officially launch the project. "Our consortium is a European laboratory of the future for establishing and scaling sustainable processes for the chemical industry," says Ziegenbalg, who coordinates the project from Ulm.
The scientific goals of PROSPER are ambitious: the international collaborative project aims to take photochemistry out of the laboratory and into industrial applications. To this end, standardized measurement methods are to be developed to uniformly record photon fluxes and radiation fields. In addition, research will be conducted into how heat and materials must be transported in the photoreactor, as both are crucial to its performance. At the same time, the aim is to find out how photocatalytic reaction steps can be better controlled and specifically regulated. Last but not least, industry needs clear rules on how plants can be operated safely in the long term.
What makes PROSPER special is that the eight doctoral students must combine basic research and application in order to address these questions scientifically. "It's great that as a doctoral student you get to work on real industrial problems," says Shiva Amanipour. The young researchers need to understand what it means when photoreactors are not only used for laboratory-scale experiments, but must be designed and developed for plants that produce chemicals on a ton-scale. This involves enormous chemical and process engineering challenges.
"With PROSPER, we want to build up the know-how needed to use photoreactors reliably and safely everywhere. All this knowledge will go into a 'digital handbook' that brings together guidelines, design principles, and performance criteria to really speed up the development of new reactors on an industrial scale in the future," says Dirk Ziegenbalg.
Participating researchers and institutions
PROSPER is coordinated by Chemical Engineering, Ulm University (Germany) and realized in collaboration with academic partners at Kemijski inštitut - National Institute of Chemistry (Blaž Likozar, Slovenia), Katholieke Universiteit Leuven (Simon Kuhn, Tom Van Gerven, Belgium), Toulouse INP (Karine Loubière, France) and Johannes-Gutenberg-Universität Mainz (Carsten Streb, Germany) and our non-academic partners Ajinomoto Omnichem (Bert Metten, Belgium), Corning Advanced-Flow Reactors (Mengxue ZHANG, France), Evonik (Germany) and Peschl Ultraviolet GmbH (Alexander Peschl, Germany).
Prof. Dr. Dirk Ziegenbalg, Institute of Chemical Engineering at Ulm University, E-Mail: dirk.ziegenbalg@uni-ulm.de
Stirred loop photoreactor with built-in static mixers
Source: Elvira Eberhardt
Copyright: Ulm University
Prof. Dirk Ziegenbalg
Source: Elvira Eberhardt
Copyright: Ulm University
Criteria of this press release:
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Chemistry, Energy
transregional, national
Research projects, Transfer of Science or Research
English
Stirred loop photoreactor with built-in static mixers
Source: Elvira Eberhardt
Copyright: Ulm University
Prof. Dirk Ziegenbalg
Source: Elvira Eberhardt
Copyright: Ulm University
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