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.
Thomas Waluga and colleagues from TUHH let an algorithm derive the kinetic rate equations of enzymatic reactions directly from measured batch curves, in Digital Chemical Engineering.
Michael Schlüter, spokesperson of the Collaborative Research Centre CRC 1615 SMART Reactors and head of the Institute of Multiphase Flows at TUHH, received this year’s CIT Lecture Award and gave the CIT Lecture at the DECHEMA Forum 2026 in Frankfurt am Main.
Moritz Hollenberg and colleagues from TUHH map raw electrical impedance tomography measurements directly onto the operating state of a bubble column, without any tomographic image reconstruction, in Industrial & Engineering Chemistry Research.
Lukas Rennpferdt and colleagues from TUHH present fabrication methods for scaling up responsive hydrogel microvalves, so that a higher throughput can be reached while fast response times are maintained, in Industrial & Engineering Chemistry Research.
Anna Klünker and colleagues from Leuphana University Lüneburg, HAW Hamburg and TUHH use a transfer operator method to uncover dynamical compartments in a stirred tank reactor and quantify the mixing between them with a Markov state model, in Industrial & Engineering Chemistry Research.
Lara Gibowsky and colleagues from TUHH and TU Graz measure how biopolymer-based hydrogel particles deform under compression and reproduce their behaviour with a new tetrapod-based discrete element model, in Materials & Design.
Anja Göbel and colleagues from Leuphana University Lüneburg and HAW Hamburg extend the transfer operator method to chemical reactions, so that flow, mixing and reaction can be followed together at low computational cost.
Johannes Gmeiner and colleagues from the University of Hamburg reinforce organogel beads with iron(III) ions, raising the compressive Young modulus by a factor of 378 while keeping the swelling fully reversible, in Polymer International.
Sri Sannihita Chavali and colleagues from TUHH and Kiel University compare Aerographite with graphite as a cathode material for electroautotrophic biofilms, addressing two bottlenecks in oxic microbial electrosynthesis, in Industrial & Engineering Chemistry Research.
