Digitising chemistry: bring digital technologies into Chemical Engineering Caves

The main aim of the project is to demonstrate that digital technologies have a lot of unrealised potential in experimental Chemical Engineering – in developing processes and catalysts; in studying and developing chemical reactors. Importantly, all of these can be done affordably with open-access software and open-access hardware like Arduino. Keeping broadly within the topic of automation in chemical engineering, the project has several alternative directions selected with the candidate depending on the preference.

One option focuses on discovery, development, and optimisation of heterogeneous catalysts – finding optimal strategies to identify, screen, and validate heterogeneous catalysts among innumerable possibilities.
Another option focuses on using a novel area of plasma catalysis – using non-thermal plasma sources in combination with heterogeneous catalysts to unlock thermodynamically-prohibited chemical transformations.

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Digitizing catalysis – intelligent formulation and utilisation of heterogeneous catalysts

The project aims to develop novel methods to synthesise and test heterogeneous catalysts without human intervention.

This multidisciplinary project focuses on heterogeneous catalysis and the possibility to automate the discovery process; to develop and implement algorithms for selecting a catalyst recipe from an infinite number of possibilities; to rely on data, but use the accumulated knowledge and experience in the catalyst design.

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