Welcome to the DFG Collaborative Research Center CRC 1615 SMART Reactors
We are facing the societal challenges of transforming economic and production chains from fossil raw materials to sustainable and renewable raw materials. However, these can fluctuate seasonally and geologically in their availability and quality. Society therefore urgently needs processes and reactors that can respond flexibly to fluctuating raw material properties. To enable such adaptation, a very high level of process control is required: pressures, temperatures, concentrations and dispersed phases must be monitored continuously and in situ in the reactors using suitable sensors.
As part of the Collaborative Research Center, we aim to address this issue and enable SMART reactors through basic research. In the future, the SMART reactors will convert sustainable renewable resources into different products (multi-purpose) in a more sustainable way and operate autonomously (self-adapting), which will lead to more resilient processes that are more transferable between scales and locations.
To achieve our vision, interdisciplinary collaboration between process engineering, materials science and electrical engineering with physicists, chemists, mathematicians and data scientists from Hamburg University of Technology and five research institutions enables the focusing of expertise and unique experimental facilities.
Within the framework of this website, we would like to give you an insight into the individual subprojects, publications related to the CRC, upcoming events and career opportunities within the Collaborative Research Center.
We would like to invite you to submit a manuscript to be considered for publication in the Industrial & Engineering Chemistry Research "Special Issue: Smart Reactors — Towards Adaptive, Resilient and Autonomous Process Systems".
Ira Christina Wirth, Daniel Niehaus, Dorothea Voß, and Jakob Albert (Hamburg University) together with Michael Schlüter (Hamburg University of Technology) have shared their latest results on the glycerol oxidation in a multiphasic jet loop reactor using polyoxometalate catalysts.
PhD candidate Nanning Jaeschke recently completed a three months research stay with Prof. Walther Chapman's group at Rice University School of Engineering and Computing in the U.S.
PhD candidates Hossein Ostovar, Moritz Hollenberg and Tom Liebing together with Dr. Oliver Korup, Dr.-Ing. Dennis Kähler, Thorsten A. Kern, and Prof. Raimund Horn have shared their latest results on simulation-driven Electrical Impedance Tomography (EIT) for buoyancy-driven electrolyte mixing.
On Thursday, November 13, 2025, the large-scale instrument, the "Environmental and In-Situ Scanning Electron Microscope," funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG), was officially inaugurated by Dr.-Ing. Martin Ritter, Head of the Electron Microscopy Unit (BEEM).
