The chemical market is under considerable cost and ecological pressure these days, in view of the new emerging markets and production capabilities in Asia, increasing customer expectations, questing new product solutions and rising environmental awareness. The improvement of conventional production processes on its own is not sufficient anymore; rather a paradigm shift for the process chemistry and plant conception is requested, which can be summarized as process intensification (PI).
This change from gradual to step-change improvements demands strong interdisciplinary cooperation on the conceptual level among chemistry, catalysis, applied physics, mechanical engineering, materials science, process automation, etc.

COPIRIDE – coordinated by the Institut for Mikrotechnik Mainz (IMM), with 16 partners and a budget of €17 million for 3.5 years – is an EU-project that focuses on developing new technologies, processes and manufacturing concepts for the “plant of the future” for the Chemical Industry.
Within Copiride, a project-developed concept – Novel Process Windows – will be applied for the first time to speed up reactions by an order of magnitude, which will give a massive boost to sustainability and cost competitiveness.

• Read the whole article Shining A Light – New Routes in Process Chemistry and Plant Conception by Prof. Dr. Volker Hessel, Project Coordinator, Institut für Mikrotechnik Mainz, Jürgen Lang, Evonik-Degussa, and Dana Kralisch, Jena University, Germany, in the CHEManager Europe.

• Information on COPIRIDE
• The picture was taken from the Topical Issue: New Process Windows Edited by Volker Hessel, Chem. Eng. Technol. 11/2009