Evonik has launched an additional production area and built a new building to house research, development, and scale-up operations for fixed bed catalysts at its Marl site in Germany. The company has been manufacturing catalysts for the past 75 years here and now will make a low double-digit million euro investment.

Fixed-bed catalysts are used mostly in the large-scale continual processes involved in the manufacture of base chemicals. The new scale-up plant is available to research and development staff for the development of catalyst formulas at the laboratory scale before using pilot units to up-scale those formulas and optimize them for application in commercial production.

In the production area, Evonik has set up an additional facility for the optimized forming of catalysts for customer delivery and application. Outfitted with highly innovative technology, this facility enables much improved material flow for the multiple processes involved, thereby almost completely making manual material transport redundant. New analysis and measuring techniques allow the process to be precision-controlled.

• Evonik Industries AG, Essen, Germany