Enhancing electrolyzer and Zirfon seperators for alkaline electrolysis (ELECZIR)
March 2023 – February 2026
The project aims at developing innovative continuous flow technologies with as prospective industrial implementation. Flow technology is especially useful for continuous processes and can be implemented at different levels going from efficient and economic screening of process conditions to process intensification. At the moment, the application of flow technology is mainly limited to the most typical and simple chemical reactions and on top of that only utilizing relatively simple reactor designs to limit process costs. More advanced technologies are at the moment not yet on an industrial level and are thus not yet commercially viable. In this project we want to close this gap for a set of industrially relevant process that are at the moment too expensive and also too inefficient, by applying advanced flow technology. The two most important processes that will be investigated are photo- and electrochemical syntheses, both “green” processes. In batch they are still insufficiently effective but this problem can be solved and big advances in yield and selectivity can be achieved by performing them in optimized flow reactors (e.g. minimal resistances and optical path length). Finally, it will also be attempted to perform equilibrium and multistep reactions continuously by implementing in-situ and in-line purification and separation of the different products.