Ziel
Solvents are widely used in process industries such as chemical, petrochemical, pharmaceutical, food, biotechnology and microelectronics. The recovery of spent solvents containing all types of impurities presents a vast market, targeting thousands of small to medium sized companies in Europe that are generating highly as well as marginally polluted solvent streams. Many current solvent purification and manufacturing practices utilise a traditional, energy-intensive distillation-based technology in the production and/or recovery of liquid chemicals. This method of processing is costly, inefficient and produces a significant volume of hazardous waste. This project, SOLVER, proposes to debottleneck the heating step as well as the thermal chemical reactions involved, and replace them with membrane separation techniques working at room temperatures and able to achieve separations at the molecular level, i.e. pervaporation (PV) and organic solvent nanofiltration (OSN). Such chemical process intensification in solvent recovery and purification is expected to lead to significant improvements in product cost, materials usage, energy and waste reduction, as well as a decrease in risk and hazards. Thanks to the interdisciplinary and complementary skills of the consortium members, SOLVER aims at demonstrating the potential of OSN/PV technology in solvent manufacturing through lab-scale and pilot testing, but also at more fundamentally understanding the processes and the behavior of the membranes during filtration. The latter will be pursued by advanced characterization and on-line process monitoring tools. SOLVER joins two types of innovative SME end-users building out new business lines to stay ahead of competition. Two SMEs are active in solvent recycling/manufacturing, the other two in OSN/PV membrane production. The SME partners form a strategic supply chain and are expected to continue to leverage on the technological head-start after the project, take the results of the RTD work directly to the market, find new applications for their products, and be the market leaders in their respective sectors.
Wissenschaftliches Gebiet
Programm/Programme
Thema/Themen
Aufforderung zur Vorschlagseinreichung
FP7-SME-2010-1
Andere Projekte für diesen Aufruf anzeigen
Finanzierungsplan
BSG-SME - Research for SMEsKoordinator
2400 Mol
Belgien