Copiride Project: A Platform for Tomorrow’s Production Solutions

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Demanding Criteria

The Copiride developers are currently working on a chemical engineering solution for five sample reactions in the following market segments: food additives, upgrading of renewables, biofuel, biomass conversion, special chemicals and the optimum process window. One company and one university have responsibility for each of the subprojects:

• Epoxidation (Mythen, Universita Degli Studi di Napoli Federico II.)

• Biodiesel production (Chemtex, Politecnico di Torino)

• Ammonia production (ITI Energy, University of Newcastle upon Tyne)

• Polymer reaction 1 and 2 (Evonik, Universität Stuttgart)

• Sugar oxidation and hydrogenation (Åbo Akademi).

There are four clearly defined goals for each reaction, and specific, measurable (“hard”) criteria are defined for those goals. The goals can be to reduce capital expense and carbon dioxide emissions, cut operating costs in half or shrink the system size by 90 percent, taking ammonia synthesis as an example. “We take these criteria as the basis for defining the process windows,” explained Coordinator Professor Volker Hessel.

Hessel, Director of the Microsystems Technology Institute in Mainz/Germany, is not only the project coordinator. He is also the initiator of Copiride. Hessel is a chemical engineer and a pioneer in the field of microreaction technology. One of his goals is to develop process technology “which exploits the speed and power of micro-structured reactors”. “We want a reactor which can do a lot more and are aiming at a process window in which processes will run 1000 times faster.” Micro-reaction technology provides a means for achieving this goal, but it is by no means the only one. Hessel views microreactors as enabling technologies, but he is not dogmatic. “We will use microtechnology wherever it makes sense. Sometime mesostructures are fully adequate.” Cost-benefit analysis is an important project tool. Fast may be good, but Hessel is far more interested in finding the best compromise between speed and efficiency.

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