Division CHEMISTRY

The chemical and pharmaceutical industry need to evolve and adapt themselves constantly to changing market conditions. These include an increasing commoditization of chemical products, a changing raw material base and climate change directly linked to the context of energy transition. Moreover, society increasingly voices the expectation that production and consumption need to become more resource-saving, environ- mental friendly, socially acceptable, in total, more sustainable and in some cases even on-demand. Chemical industry is the base of many value chains and often the most important driving force for innovations in other fields. As Europe’s most important chemical producer, Germany especially faces the public as well as competitive pressure to establish a sustainable chemistry.

The Business Field Chemistry deals with the improvement and sustainable design of chemical production processes using in-house technologies. These technologies enable precisely controlled continuous chemical processes with increased process safety and resource and energy efficiency. Moreover they allow the preparation of materials with tailor-made properties and their formulation in reproducible quality.

They foster decentralized, modular and flexible production concepts e.g. facilitating the adaptation to a raw material base changing towards more renewables. Sustainability is especially addressed by using regeneratively produced excess electricity to synthesize valuable chemicals with high efficien- cy and selectivity applying electrochemical microreactors. Photochemical microreactors with optimized use of light allow for green paths in organic synthesis and the utilization of carbon dioxide. The business field activities are round- up by specialized sensor technology for environmental and process monitoring.

Services provided for our customers and partners cover feasibility studies, lab chemical process development in the area of flow chemistry and formulation, the development and realization of specialized flow reactors (with an increasing use of additive manufacturing technologies) up to production scale and of sensor technology, and further support in transferring the results in chemical production and application e.g. by the establishment of demonstrators at pilot scale level.