Martijn de Graaff of TNO and Pieter Swinkels of TU Delft discuss the challenges of implementing process intensification in new product and process innovation. The Delft Product & Process Design Institute at Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands (TU Delft) has seen over 100 case studies on product and process innovation that PDEng trainees solve for industry as part of their post-MSc designer traineeship. And, although efficient processes, minimal energy use and less waste are essential to addressing the needs of a growing world population, process innovation is often considered to be secondary to product innovation.
Today, a lot of effort is going into intensifying reactions within the chemicals industry. Intensified processes are expected to deliver significant improvements in manufacturing processes, reducing equipment size and waste streams and increasing product yields and thereby delivering more sustainable process conditions.
In the fine chemicals industry, the batch reactor has been the established workhorse for carrying out reactions. Its main advantage here is being multi-purpose. The chemistry that fits with this kind of equipment is, however, limited to relatively slow and mild reactions because of the limited wall surface area available for cooling. This limitation hinders the implementation of more demanding exothermic and hazardous reactions in the industry, creating a need to intensify the existing processes.
Crystallisation from a melt or solution has the potential to yield a product with a very high purity in a single equilibrium step. Pure crystals have to be separated from the impure mother liquor, which is usually done by standard solid-liquid separation techniques like filtration or centrifugation. For high purity products, additional washing is required to remove residual mother liquor from the crystal cake. An attractive alternative, however, is to use a wash column, which combines continuous solid-liquid separation with efficient counter-current washing using very little or no wash liquid. The hydraulic wash column (HWC) developed by TNO combines a high washing efficiency with a high specific production capacity.
ChemInform is a weekly Abstracting Service, delivering concise information at a glance that was extracted from about 200 leading journals. To access a ChemInform Abstract, please click on HTML or PDF.
GHK-Cu emerged during my attempts to reverse certain changes that occur during human ageing. The goal was to suppress the synthesis of the blood fibrinogen, a protein that rises with age and rises even more after myocardial infraction. Its blood concentration is an excellent predictor of mortality. Elevated fibrinogen levels increase blood coagulation and decrease tissue perfusion, by increasing the thixotropic properties of blood in the microcirculation. I found that the albumin fraction of human blood plasma has a suppressive action on fibrinogen synthesis and also improved the survival of the cultured liver cells that produce fibrinogen. Further isolations found these activities concentrated in a low molecular weight fraction that contained GHK-Cu.1 Subsequent work defined the three dimensional solution structure of GHK-Cu and the binding affinities between GHK and copper (II), as shown in Figure 1.2
