Role of Participants


The consortium consists of 8 partners from 6 countries, including France, Germany, Poland, Romania, Switzerland and The Netherlands. Each of these countries is either a member state, a candidate state (Romania), or an associated state (Switzerland). Therefore, this joint European R+D project exhibits a highly integrative character. The consortium comprises very complementary skills and expertises from different disciplines, which are all required to address the overall goal of the project, which is the development of a flexible, multi-purpose microreaction plant for industrial nitration processes. The activities and main responsibilities of the project partners can be clearly allocated. The novel approach for the design of the microreaction units and the entire process is based on highly innovative modelling work using different tools and strategies (by PDC). New microstructured sensors and sampling devices for analysis will be developed by UoW. These microcomponents will be adapted to new types of microfluidic reactors that are designed for high-throughput nitration processes (by PDC) and fabricated in glass (mikroglas). By developing a flexible automation system (IPA) that will receive process data from the microfluidic sensors a process monitoring and control will be realized. The entire microreaction process will be technically designed, constructed and finally set-up by Plinke. The two industrial stakeholders EMS and SNPE represent the industrial user of the microreaction plant. They will perform extensive testing of the prototype (parameter screenings, in-depth analyses, small-scale productions) by investigating and improving different nitration processes at different sites. Both partners and ICT will also significantly contribute to the selection of representative nitration reactions at the beginning of the project to ensure a broad applicability of the developments. ICT will also be responsible for the gathering of additional knowledge about the nitration processes. An extensive experimental data acquisition for the modelling and simulation work and experimental process optimizations by using laboratory microreaction set-ups will also be conducted by ICT.
The complementary partnership in this project generates the necessary critical mass of resources that covers a broad scientific and technological spectrum.

Complementary contributions of the different partners with respect to the project activities