Modular flow cells for sustainable chemistry

Optimization of electrochemical manufacturing processes

05-Sep-2023 - Electrochemical processes like water electrolysis will become increasingly important in the future in light of climate change and the resultant need for an energy and raw materials transition. The Fraunhofer Institute for Microengineering and Microsystems IMM is collaborating with hte GmbH to ...

From a greenhouse gas to an industrial raw material

06-Dec-2022 - Rather than being released into the atmosphere and exacerbating the problem of climate change, CO2 can also be used as a raw material for substances required in industrial processes, such as formic acid or methanol. The conversion of CO2 has already been investigated in detail in laboratory ...

How glass learns to illuminate itself and create heat

Among other things, this can be used to produce electrically conductive and self-heating glass microreactors for the chemical and pharmaceutical industries

31-Mar-2022 - Glass objects which glow in the dark, glass containers that heat up and cool down, or glass control knobs and switches that eliminate viruses and bacteria by themselves – all this seems to completely contradict our everyday experience of what glass can do. And yet, it is now within reach. To ...

Microreactor for synthesis with Grignard reagents

Continuous process control: faster, safer, cleaner

06-Jan-2021 - In 1912, Victor Grignard was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for his discovery of what came to be known as Grignard reagents. Since then, these compounds have come to play a key role in the chemical and pharmaceutical industries. Now, in a development by Fraunhofer researchers, a new type of ...

Researchers design microsystem for faster, more sustainable industrial chemistry

Lab reactor, liquefied catalyst, and machine learning for more efficient polymerization design

16-Apr-2020 - The synthesis of plastic precursors, such as polymers, involves specialized catalysts. However, the traditional batch-based method of finding and screening the right ones for a given result consumes liters of solvent, generates large quantities of chemical waste, and is an expensive, ...

Reaction calorimetry in microreactors

12-Jun-2018 - At Achema 2018 the Fraunhofer Institute for Chemical Technology will demonstrate the latest gen-eration of continuous reaction calorimeters. These permit rapid screening of thermokinetic data, making kinetic constants and safety-relevant data available in the early stages of process ...

What plants can teach us about oil spill clean-up, microfluidics

22-Mar-2018 - For years, scientists have been inspired by nature to innovate solutions to tricky problems, even oil spills -- manmade disasters with devastating environmental and economic consequences. A new USC study takes a cue from leaf structure to fabricate material that can separate oil and water, which ...

Novel Mesoscale Segmented Flow Reactor

29-Aug-2016 - In an ideal flow crystallizer, nucleation and growth occur at the same location and rate for a given set of parameters. Particles are well suspended with good mixing throughout the reactor, while plug flow is achieved. However until recently traditional flow crystallizers have been either ...

Tracking catalytic reactions in microreactors

25-Feb-2014 - A pathway to more effective and efficient synthesis of pharmaceutical drugs and other flow reactor chemical products has been opened by a study in which for the first time the catalytic reactivity inside a microreactor was mapped in high resolution from start-to-finish. The results not only ...

Microreactors to produce explosive materials

01-Jun-2012 - If the task is to tunnel through a mountain, workers turn to explosives: the 15-kilometer-long Gotthard Tunnel, for instance, was created by blasting through the rock with explosive gelatin made largely out of the nitroglycerine – better-known as dynamite. Producing these explosives calls for ...