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 projects, publications related to the CRC, upcoming events and career opportunities within the Collaborative Research Center.

 

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News CRC 1615

16.07.26
As part of our CRC seminar series, Professor Takors gave an inspiring lecture on "Utilizing CO and CO2 containing off-gas in gas fermentation: Scaling from lab to production scale – and back".
25.06.26
Kayla Dittmer and colleagues from TUHH have published new results on the immobilisation of formate dehydrogenase on pH-, temperature- and dual-responsive hydrogel carriers, demonstrating their potential as smart enzyme carriers, in Industrial & Engineering Chemistry Research.
17.06.26
In a new publication in Chemical Engineering and Processing: Process Intensification, Leandros Paschalidis and colleagues from TUHH show that CO2 desorption can occur well below the temperatures required for conventional steam stripping, opening pathways to low-temperature solvent regeneration.
12.06.26
As part of our CRC seminar series, Professor Pirker gave an outstanding lecture on "Real-time recurrence CFD simulations in the realm of SMART Reactors".
27.05.26
The spokesperson of the CRC 1615 SMART Reactors from TU Hamburg was welcomed by the CRC/TRR 287 BULK-REACTION at the Otto-von-Guericke University Magdeburg for giving a lecture on the future of SMART reactors.
15.05.26
Guanru Pan and Timm Faulwasser from the Institute of Control Systems at TUHH, together with colleagues from NTNU Trondheim, have had their paper on “Uncertainty Propagation under Residual Disturbances” accepted for the 23rd IFAC World Congress in Busan/Korea from August 23 to 28, 2026.
14.05.26
Artyom Tsanda and his colleagues from TUHH have published new results on system matrix restoration for Magnetic Particle Imaging using deep learning and physics - based simulation training data, in Physics in Medicine and Biology.
27.04.26
PhD candidate Timo Merbach and his colleagues from CRC's projects B03, B06 and C01 have shared their latest results 3D Liquid Flow Fields in Additive Manufactured Structures for SMART Reactors Using Large-Scale Vertical Magnetic Resonance Imaging and Computational Fluid Dynamics.
20.04.26
Researchers from CRC projects A03 (TUHH) and C03 (University of Hamburg) have successfully completed the first field tests of a newly developed hydrogen sensor, delivering promising insights into hydrogen dissolved in the liquid phase.
03.04.26
Exciting new results have just been published on "Boosting the chemical hydrogenolysis of glycerol to 1,2-propanediol" by P. Hassenstein, D. Niehaus, N. Taherkhani, J. Krueger, D. Voß, D. Lumpp, J. Albert from UHH together with B. Schroeter, I. Smirnova, L. Paschalidis, and M. Skiborowski from TUHH.

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