Reactors for Future Process Engineering

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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.

15.03.2024

CRC SMART Reactors at the "57. Jahrestreffen Deutscher Katalytiker"

Our consortium members Professor Raimund Horn and PhD candidate Diego Espinoza from the Institute of Chemical Reaction Engineering at TUHH introduced new methods for intra-reactor diagnostic measurements at the DECHEMA conference in Weimar.

The topic of Diego´s poster was "Spatially Resolved Elemental Analysis of Catalysts in a Fixed-Bed Reactor by Laser-Induced Breakdown Spectroscopy (LIBS) ". The goal of the research is to introduce a novel characterization technique in the field of heterogeneous catalysis. LIBS has the potential to provide insight into the distribution of promotors, poisons, and active metals, which are key elements commonly found in industrial catalysts.

In an oral presentation “Iso-potential Operando DRIFTS: Measuring Adsorbate Profiles inside Catalytic Reactors”, Raimund Horn presented a novel concept to perform Operando spectroscopy inside catalytic reactors. This new concept opens the possibility to couple a variety of spectroscopic and microscopic methods (e.g. DRIFTS, XRD, EPR, UV/Vis, Fluorescence, XAS, SEM, TEM) in an optimized way with catalytic reactors of arbitrary shape and size.