Meet the flow chemist
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EDITORIAL
Meet the flow chemist Timothy Noël 1 Published online: 4 December 2020 # Akadémiai Kiadó 2020
Meet the flow chemist – Dr. Christian Hornung
Name Date of Birth Position E-mail Homepage Education
1) When did you start with flow chemistry? Describe the first paper or the first experiments. My first contact with continuous flow microreactors was during my undergraduate student project at the University of Erlangen, supervised by Franziska Scheffler and Wilhelm Schwieger in 2001. The project was concerned with the hydrothermal synthesis of catalytic ZSM-5 zeolite coatings on micro-structured aluminium plates used for gas phase catalysis. At Cambridge I then changed to working with polymer capillary reactors to synthesize heterocycles and other small molecules, before I moved on to making polymers in tubular flow reactors at CSIRO a few years later. In recent years, I have returned to the world of heterogeneous catalysis, working on 3D printed structured catalysts that contain catalytic coatings and are used in continuous flow hydrogenations. 2) What are the main benefits of flow that convinced you to use and implement this technology in your research?
* Timothy Noël [email protected] 1
Department of Chemical Engineering and Chemistry, Eindhoven University of Technology, Eindhoven, Netherlands
Christian H Hornung 08/05/1978 Research Group Leader & Director of FloWorks, CSIRO (Melbourne, Australia) [email protected] https://research.csiro.au/floworks/ 2004 Master in Chemical Engineering, University of Erlangen 2008 PhD in Chemical Engineering with Malcolm R Mackley & Steven V Ley, University of Cambridge
The beauty of the continuous flow processing technology is that the benefits manifest themselves in many different ways, and across a very wide spectrum of chemistry applications. These can include the safe operation of a highly exothermic reaction not manageable at the same process intensity in batch, the scalability of a photochemical reaction that only ever progresses at practical rates on very small scale in batch, the much improved product reproducibility in a manufacturing process, or the capability to link several continuous flow processing steps without the need to isolate and handle toxic, unstable, odorous or otherwise hazardous intermediates. The arguments for a continuous flow process can be manifold; different users in industry or academia will have different priorities, and in some cases it is more than one reason that makes the case for flow over batch. 3) What do you think the future holds for flow chemistry? Currently there are four main trends that R&D effort within the flow chemistry community focus on: alternative forms of activation, distributed manufacturing, additive manufacturing and artificial intelligence (AI). New tools to facilitate chemical activation using light, electricity or plasma will mature further towards implementation on manufacturing scale. These new methodologies all share one fundamental commonality, namely process intensity-related symbiotic effects between
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