Laboratory for Heterogeneous Catalysis
The Laboratory for Heterogeneous Catalysis is dealing with the problems of waste, inefficiencies in processes and adopting the life-cycle approach to process and product development. The group is developing future materials and processes, specialising in process intensification, multifunctional compact reactors, catalytic materials and adsorbents, reaction and reactor modelling, and transient kinetic studies.
Facilities of the group are located in the Reaction Engineering laboratory within the School of Engineering at Warwick. In the design of this facility we adopted the spirit of flexible research space, creating an open plan laboratory with services in the ceiling, movable work benches and drop-down 'service columns'. The laboratory has a separated room for catalytic reaction with gases at high pressure allowing even operation with hydrogen and carbon monoxide up to 50 bars. The laboratory was created with the view towards Sustainable Processes, deliberately restricting the use of highly toxic substances, reducing the use of solvents and reducing the energy use in the lab, by adoption of only recirculating fume hoods with the adsorbtion technology.
Research topics
Research areas in the group are split into two broad topics:
- Processing of bio-feedstocks / bio-chemical transformations as the first steps towards renewables supply chain and biorefinety, and
- Development of cleaner chemical technologies, mainly focusing on multifunctional compact continuous reactors and multifunctional materials.
These topics fall within the remit of Green (or Sustainable) Chemical Technology - design of new processes and products with zero waste, high energy efficiency, zero toxicity and minimal impact over life cycle. We are developing a complex, Systems' approach to design of materials and processes.
Structured and compact reactors
Compact Multifunctional Reactors is an approach to process intensification (PI) in which intensification is achieved via:
- increase in the rate of transport processes (energy and mass) due to reduction in the transport lengths,
- better control over concentration profiles or, generally, over reaction environment,
- ability to utilize non-thermal energy fields, such as electric, magnetic, light for molecular activation, enabled by the small dimensions,
- reduction in the number of unit operations due to combination of mixing, reaction, heat transfer and separation functions into a single unit,
- potential to scale processes by numbering-up of identical process units.
These features lead to the development of small footprint, less capital intensive and cheaper to run processes, which also frequently enable reactions, that cannot be performed safely in any other way. An example of an architecture of a compact multifunctional catalytic micro packed-bed reactor is shown in the image. This schematic was developed in a European project CREATION by the group of Pawel Plucinski, Alexei Lapkin and Stan Kolaczkowski at the University of Bath and extensively studied in the reactions of selective catalytic oxidation, reduction and C-C coupling, see Literature
Recent projects in the field of reactor technology
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EU FP7 project COOPOL. The project was a collaboration with RWTH Aachen, University of Hamburg, Prague Institute of Chemical Technology, BASF, Cybernetica (Norway) and CIKTN (UK). The project aimed at developing non-linear model predictive control for intensification of chemical processes. Specifically in this project we workws on emulsion polymerisation. The project was coordinated by our group and Warwick team included our group and the group of Professor Dave Haddleton (Chemistry). |
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EU FP7 project FREECATS. The project was a collaboration with Instituto de Carboquímica in Zaragoza (Spain), Faculdade de Engenharia, Universidade do Porto (Portugal), Norges teknisk-naturvitenskapelige universitet NTNU (Norway), Centre National de la Recherche Scientific (Lillle & Strasbourg, France), Institute of Chemistry of OrganoMetallic Compounds, (Florence, Italy), SICAT (France), Prototech AS (Norway), Adventech – Advanced Environmental Technologies Lda (Portugal) and the University of Warwick (UK). The project aimed at developing novel catalytic technologies based on non-metallic nanostructured carbon catalysts for several industrially relevant processes. The role of Warwick's group in this project was to develop reaction models, optimise reactor design and perform Life Cycle Assessment. The team at Warwick involved our group and group of Petr Denissenko |
| FP7 project SYNFLOW. This is a large collaborative project involving 19 partners. The project is developing an integrated approach to process design, linking molecular understanding of catalytic processes with development of novel reaction media and reactor concepts. It is aimed to demonstrate a number of industrially-relevant reaction types in continuous flow clean catalytic processes. The role of our group was in developing reaction engineering concepts for several classes of coupling reactions, in particular focusing on the reactor concepts for liquid-solid flows, and performing Life Cycle Assessment of several case study reactions. |
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Synthesis of inorganic materials. An industrial CASE project involving MEL Chemicals. This project looked at novel approaches to the synthesis of functional inorganic materials. The new approach delivers tighter control over products' characteristics and a reduction in the aqueous waste of the synthesis. |
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Flow approaches to the conversion of triglycerides. This project is a collaboration with the group of Dr Andrew Clark (Warwick, Chemistry). We are developing flow processes to enable easy scaling of laboratory-derived approaches to conversion of triglyceride waste streams into higher-value chemicals. |
Bioprocessing
The emerging biorefining technology encompasses many processes, from primary processing of bio feedstocks (wood, grass, wood waste, algae, etc), to thermochemical and fermentation technologies, to downstream catalytic and biocatalytic technologies to make novel platform molecules and novel materials for bio-based supply chain of chemicals. Our group has been working on solvent extraction technology to access structurally complex molecules of interest for biomedical and other advanced applications.