NEPUMUC
NEW ECO-EFICIENT INDUSTRIAL PROCESS USING MICROSTRUCTURED UNIT COMPONENTS – SAFE AND ENVIRONMENTAL FRIENDLY PRODUCTION OF SENSITIVE COMPOUNDS ENSURED BY PROCESS INTENSIFICATION

Project co-ordinator: Fraunhofer-Gesellschaft zur Foerderung der angewandten Forschung e.V. - Germany
Contact Person (in Romania): Sorin Baban, SC IPA SA

Project Summary :

The overall goal of the NEPUMUC project is to make the benefits of microreaction technology available for industrial purposes, in particular nitration chemistry.Therefore, the project partners will jointly develop, test and evaluate a new microreaction process as a prototype to demonstrate that even under industrial requirements microreaction technology can be made available in a flexible and multi-purpose manner.

The project will address these different technical challenges by new and highly innovative methods and technologies. For the first time, simulation and modelling tools will be consequently applied for the design of both the entire nitration process and its core component, the microfluidic reaction unit. This will be a totally new approach to overcome the problems of achieving sufficient throughput although microfluidic structures are used.

To enable a robust, stable and safe processing under high industrial requirements, new microfluidic sensors will be developed and adapted to the microreaction units. These sensors will allow an accurate process monitoring and process control in the immediate vicinity of the most important part of the process: the microreactor. For the first time, microfluidic sensors will become an integral part of an industrial microreaction process.

Finally, the development of an appropriate automation system that interacts accurately with bothmicrofluidic sensors and macroscopic actuators (pumps, heating/cooling devices) will make microreaction technology processable like conventional chemical processes.

 IPA’s Contribution to the project:

IPA will develop a flexible automation system, its interaction with sensors and actuators and its integration into the overall microreaction plant. The flexibility of the system will be realized by the designed hardware and, mainly, by the developed software. The system will be designed to support aditional I/O signals and control algorithms if the future development of the reactor will request it.- to elaborate technological roadmaps in nanosciences and nanotechnologies.