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.
The guest from Milano/Italy gave an outstanding talk on "Bubble column fluid dynamics: a multi-scale perspective towards smart bubble column reactors" at the CRC seminar.
Professor Daniel Ruprecht presented their latest research results on "Efficient numerical methods for the Maxey-Riley-Gatignol equations" at the GAMM Annual Meeting 2025 of the Gesellschaft für Angewandte Mathematik und Mechanik from 7 to 11 April.
CRC researcher Niclas Alkazaz and his supervisor Prof. Patrick Huber from the Institute for Materials and X-Ray Physics at the TUHH presented a poster at this year’s MRS Spring Meeting in Seattle focusing on their latest research on in situ hydrogen detection in reactors.
The Best Lecture Award of the "Fachgruppe Mehrphaseströmungen" was given to our PhD candidate Kathrin Eckert from the Institute of Thermal Separation Processes for her talk on "Stimuli-Responsive Structures for SMART Reactors".
The guest from Raleigh/USA gave an inspiring talk on „Exploring Solid-Liquid Interfaces: Insights from Atomic Force Microscopy“ at our CRC seminar, showing how AFM can be utilized to ionic arrangement on solid-liquid interfaces and how this contributes to our understanding for new energy materials.
