Challenges and opportunities for process intensification in Europe from a process systems engineering perspective

Process Intensification (PI) is an effective way to enhance process efficiency and sustainability at affordable costs and efforts, attracting particular interest in the European area, as one of the most important chemical production areas in the world. PI primarily contributes by developing and testing new processing technologies that once...

Process systems engineering perspectives on eco-efficient downstream processing of volatile biochemicals from fermentation

Increasing concerns over environmental pollution, climate change and energy security are driving a necessary transition from fossil carbon sources to more sustainable alternatives. Due to lower environmental impact, biochemicals are rapidly gaining significance as a potential renewable solution, particularly of interest in Europe. In this...

Eco-efficiency improvements in the propylene-to-epichlorohydrin process

BACKGROUND: Epichlorohydrin (ECH) production is an important industrial process, owing to its importance in windmill blade manufacture, but it suffers from several drawbacks such as high energy use, large wastewater production and low atom efficiency. This original study investigates a novel chlorohydrin-free technology with an enhanced...

Monolithic fiber/foam-structured catalysts: beyond honeycombs and micro-channels

Heterogeneous catalysis plays a pivotal role in the current chemical and energy vectors production. Notably, to fully utilize the intrinsic activity and selectivity of a catalyst, the chemical reactor has to be designed and operated optimally to achieve enhanced heat/mass transfer, well-defined contact time of reactants, uniform flow pattern,...

Process Intensification as Game Changer in Enzyme Catalysis

Enzyme catalysis, made tremendous progress over the last years in identification of new enzymes and new enzymatic reactivity’s as well as optimization of existing enzymes. However, the performance of the resulting processes is often still limited, e.g., in regard of productivity, realized product concentrations and the stability of the enzymes....

Multiscale Structure-Performance Relationships in Supported Palladium Catalysis for Multiphase Hydrogenations

The performance of heterogeneous catalysts in multiphase reactions in general is governed by different types of extrinsic and intrinsic structural effects on all length scales, i.e., on the macro- (m to cm), meso- (mm to µm), and microlevel (nm). This PhD research, with a catalysis-engineering approach, focused on several of these multiscale...

Process Intensification in Crystallization: Submicron Particle Generation Using Alternative Energy Forms

Crystallization is one of the oldest separation and product formation techniques that continues to be in use today. Despite its long history, it only started to develop significantly in the past few decades. In this thesis, the application of Process Intensification in crystallization is investigated. Process Intensification is a set of often...

Microwave Enhanced Reactive Distillation

The application of electromagnetic irradiation in form of microwaves (MW) has gathered the attention of the scientific community in recent years. MW used as an alternative energy source for chemical syntheses (microwave chemistry) can provide clear advantages over conventional heating methods in terms of reaction time, yield and selectivity....