Major challenges of the European society such as the climate crisis, insufficient environmental protection, pharmaceutical shortages, and military aggressions require solutions that substitute fossil fuels by sustainable energy sources and significantly reduce energy consumption in basically all industries. Following the green deal of the EU commission, the European continent shall become the first climate-neutral continent by 2050. Particularly, the chemical industry is a major contributor to CO2 emissions as it accounts for about 30 % of industrys’ total energy use worldwide. As a consequence, disruptive new technologies must be developed to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.
It is widely agreed that photochemistry in flow reactors is an eco-friendly and safe technology for the synthesis of useful compounds and further applications such as water treatment. Compared to batch reactors, flow photochemistry benefits significantly from continuous flow due to improved reaction selectivity, irradiation conditions, mass and heat exchange, and operation safety. However, despite the overwhelming advantages of microreactor flow photochemistry, the technique has not been widely adopted by the chemical industry, so far. A major bottleneck is the missing light management inside the microflow reactors, which significantly hinders its upscaling and large-scale application in industry. This is exactly where the key to the technological and economic breakthrough lies, and this is where reaCtor comes into play by offering an innovative solution, which allows for decoupling the light excitation from the reaction fluid. By integrating a chemical reactor inside a specialty optical glass fiber, inside which light is further redistributed through plasmonic nanoparticles, our approach allows for unprecedented levels of light management, full excitation wavelength tunability and industry demanded scale-up.
To reach this ambitious goal, the interdisciplinary reaCtor consortium works on several objectives: A novel microreactor fiber for high efficiency interaction with the reaction volume is designed, fabricated, and validated. In addition, for efficient and robust optofluidic interfacing, two concepts are under development: a novel monolithic fiber component and laser-based micro-machining process. For enhanced reactant excitation and flow photochemical reaction yield, plasmonic nanoparticles are designed and will be implemented in the microreactor fiber. The final outcome of reaCtor will be a demonstrator of the proposed microreactor, which will be validated and benchmarked with respect to a number of photochemical reactions. The technical work is accompanied by a strong dissemination and communication strategy to engage relevant stakeholders.
