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discovered_02_2013

discovered 02.13 FOCUS WWW.Hzdr.DE The trend towards environmental sustainability has not escaped the attention of chemical industry, of course. The production of important products often requires not just huge amounts of energy, but also consumes vast amounts of money. As a result, the industry has been committed to optimizing its manufacturing processes for a number of years. As liquids play an important role in many of these processes, the fluid flows in the reactors are crucial to the energy balance and to the product yield. It is precisely these processes that have hardly been investigated so far. Now, however, Markus Schubert from the Helmholtz-Zentrum Dresden-Rossendorf is pushing this basic research along with these kinds of specific applications in mind. The process engineer is working on the transition from the test tube to large chemical reactors. Many reactions work very well in the laboratory, but their efficiency deteriorates considerably when they are scaled up. It stands to reason: As gases react with liquids in many of these reactions, the flows of both these phases also influence the reaction rates and energy consumption. In a test tube, the flows hardly play any role, while in considerably larger chemical reactors, their role is significant. Schubert is investigating fluid flows of gases and liquids in a bubble column reactor. Basically, this is a glass cylinder with a diameter of about 20 centimeter (almost eight inches), can stand a few meters in height, and contains water for the initial experiments. "Many industrial reactions are with organic liquids, but water is a reference system for which a relatively large number of results is available," the researcher explains about this choice. Later on, he will also examine organic liquids in detail, of course. // Using X-rays to understand flows, and to improve chemical processes. _TEXT . Roland Knauer From the "test tube" to the chemical reactor RAPID IMAGES: Electrical engineer Martina Bieberle is using images of liquid and gas flow mixtures taken with X-ray tomograph ROFEX. What makes them stand out is their unusually high temporal resolution. Photo: Rainer Weisflog

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