Project CoPIRIDE

COPIRIDE is an EU-project that focuses on developing new technologies, processes and manufacturing concepts for the “plant of the future” for the Chemical Industry.

Note: The COPIRIDE project ended 31.08.2013. This website mimics the status of the COPIRIDE public website at the end of the project. Further project results (especially the public final project summary is accessible via EC Cordis website (https://cordis.europa.eu/project/rcn/92652/factsheet/en).

COPIRIDE stands for

Combining Process Intensification-driven Manufacture of Microstructured Reactors and Process Design regarding to Industrial Dimensions and Environment

The ultimate ambition of COPIRIDE is to develop a modular production and factory concept for the chemical industry using adaptable plants with flexible output. This concept will be new, superior, intellectual property (IP) protected, and enable a much wider spread of know-how and education of this skill-intensive technology.  

These days, the chemical market is under considerable cost and ecological pressure. A promising approach to improve competitiveness is the concept of process intensification (PI). This means the development of entirely new concepts for process steps and equipment in contrast to process development, relying on performance improvement of existing concepts, as defined by the European Roadmap for Process Intensification.

The aim of COPIRIDE is to develop the future manufacturing concept to strengthen the competitive position of Europe by developing a modular production and factory concept for the chemical industry using adaptable plants with flexible output. This concept will be new, superior, intellectual property (IP) protected, and enable a much wider spread of know-how and education of this skill-intensive technology.

Key functional and enabling units are new production-scale, mass-manufactured microstructured reactors as well as other integrated process intensification (PI) reactors realising integrated processes. This will lead to a substantial reduction in costs, resources & energy and notably improves the eco-efficiency.  

COPIRIDE objectives are:

• to provide entirely new concepts for process steps and equipment/plants and to improve technology
• to provide a modular plant platform in block format as flexible functional modules with extension to a mobile and compact cell-based container format, with the surplus of intellectual property protection
• to develop an upgradeable cell format for the plants allowing to perform laboratory, pilot, and production-scale experiment
• to reduce resources demand and costs, improve eco-efficiency and therefore maintain the economic competitiveness and environmental friendly processing and products
  
• to open and transfer (PI) know-how and technology between European countries, companies and branches.

With regard to reactors:

• to make standardised microstructured reactor design accessible for production characterised by large plate extension, large plate numbers, and large numbers of reactors
• to extend established integrated microstructured reactors to pilot and production format and to develop new ways of integration (membranes, 2nd PI field).

The five key research areas are catalysts, fabrication, reactors, plants and processes.
Due to the entire modular plant concept comprising all utilities – far beyond the reaction & processual parts - a strongly interdisciplinary and holistic PI concept is provided, covering the whole development cycle with, e.g., safety & process control & plant approval. Features, inter alia, are fast plant start-up and shut-down for multipurpose functionality (flexibility in products), sustainable & safe production, and fast transfer from lab to production & business (time-to-market). Industrial demonstration activities up to production scale with five field trials present a good cross-section of reactions relevant to the EU chemical industry.

A deeply rooted base will be created for IP rights (Copyright, © = COPIRIDE) by generic modular reactor & plant design and new generic processes via ‘Novel Process Windows’, facilitating patent filing.

Catalyst Optimisation
 

• to optimise known catalyst systems, based on previously applied wall coating in microstructured reactors, with focus of their PI potential
• to develop coating techniques with said catalysts
  
• to develop and test a new carrier / structuring concept - nano-structured macro-porous metals / ceramics
  
• to develop intensified catalytic (hybrid) microstructured reactors using nano-structured macro-porous materials in the presence of an applied process intensification field.
  
• to jointly agree on developments with the industrial partners (which do not need to be directly involved in the WP)

Intensifying Process Windows and Reactor Engineering
 

• to transform batch into continuous and non-catalytic into catalytic processes
  
• to view the different reactions under the umbrella of a joint PI investigation with common development goals
  
• to gather calorimetric and kinetic data
  
• to perform flow modelling and heat management calculations for reactor and process flow engineering
  
• to apply “Novel Process Windows” for maximising process intensification

Modular Microreactor Design, Fabrication, and Testing
 

• to develop reactor concepts for six reaction examples
  
• to fabricate said reactors via established manufacturing techniques
  
• to introduce and test alternative manufacturing techniques for the reactors

Development of Modular and other Mini-Production Plants
 

• to develop modular mini-production plant platform concepts for the four fine-chemical applications with a holistic view on the whole process development cycle from laboratory to production
  
• to re-evaluate this platform concept through operation and maintenance experience in the pilot demonstrations
  
• to further develop the platform concept with respect to system integration, operation, and maintenance experience
  
• to a high-pressure supercritical plant in a dedicated environment
  
• to develop a tailored integrated plant for the syngas application with 2nd PI field, specifically for the biofuel sector

Industrial Demonstration Activities by Field Trials

• to perform demonstration activities by field trials at the industrial sites.
  
• to ensure future further dissemination of project results through successful and convincing performance of experiments at “real-life” production scale

LCA (life cycle assessment) and Cost Analysis

• to act as an controlling and internal evaluation body with respect to industrial effects and environmental impacts
  
• to give directions for technology choice prior to developments by rough calculations
  
• to enable benchmarking of technology downstream of developments by detailed calculations
  
• improving eco-efficiency of the processes designed
  
• communicate the potential of PI technologies to improve sustainability of production processes
  
• generate standardised life cycle inventory data on microreaction technology for common use within the European community

COPIRIDE Newsletter

The COPIRIDE newsletter provides you with latest news about the project.

Issue 5/2013 of the “Green Processing and Synthesis (GPS)” journal is focused on CoPIRIDE project results. GPS is dedicated in general to innovative and green process development and chemical synthesis covering topics like sustainable chemistry, flow chemistry, process intensification, novel process windows and micro process technology. So it is an ideal platform to disseminate main results of the CoPIRIDE project.

Besides the guest editorial from project coordinator Dr. Patrick Löb, 8 scientific contributions provide a deep insight in major project topics and results. The contributions report on process insights concerning an anionic polymerization process and concerning the epoxidation of soybean oil, on microreactor performance and contribution to process intensification, on novel manufacturing techniques for microstructured reactors targeting production scale and on a holistic, life-cycle based evaluation approach followed in the project to provide multi-criteria decision support for ecological sustainable and economic viable processes.

Together with former articles in GPS from project partners, GPS emerged quite as a compendium of CoPIRIDE works.

Selected articles are available as open access.  

Four training courses have been prepared based on project works and results for use in public training and in academic teaching. It has been the ambition of the project to promote the proper utilization of the gained knowledge for future similar applications. For this, common lecture material has been prepared by the involved project partners. Around the industrial application examples, aspects like the determination of the intensification potential of the process, defining the aims of further process development, the decision for applicable tools to reach these aims and finally joining these activities in the creation and operation of pilot-scale reaction plants are covered. So, three of the four training courses are dedicated to the industrial application examples anionic polymerisation of butadiene, biodiesel production and epoxidation of vegetable oils. The following topics are thereby addressed: the chemistry behind the application, chemical technology: state of the art, identifying Novel Process Windows, intensified, flow through suited process protocol, estimation of the Process Intensification factor, pilot plan and Life Cycle Assessment. The fourth course gives an introduction into the topic of Life Cycle Assessment. The slides of these courses are available on request. In case of interest, please contact: Patrick Löb .  

Suschem - The European Technology Platform for Sustainable Chemistry

ProcessNet

EU - Community Research and Development Information Service

CPAC SATELLITE WORKSHOP 2010 - Micro-Instrumentation, Process Intensification, and Process Optimization Workshop;
March 22 - 25, 2010 in Rome, Italy

Catalytic Reaction Engineering and Process Intensification
Summer School: July 11-18, 2010, Lausanne, Switzerland

CHISA - International Congress of Chemical and Process Engineering and European Congress of Chemical Engineering ECCE-7
August 29 - September 2, 2010 in Prague, Czech Republic