题目：Flow and Plasma Chemistry - Disruptive Technologies Transform Industry on Earth and in Space

主讲嘉宾：Volker Hessel教授（The University of Adelaide）

讲座时间：2019年7月27日（周六）15:00-16:00

讲座地点：化工楼A308

欢迎有兴趣的师生前来聆听！

At our Faculty at theUniversity of Adelaide, a unique Theme-based approach which truly leads to an interdisciplinary research outcome was developed (as opposed to multidisciplinary), and this is run as cross-faculty and cross-discipline action. Core is a selection and targeting of industrial windows of opportunity to be translated to an industrial showcases, which is followed by technology development and stakeholder engagement. Outcome is an aim for transformativechange of industry by disruptive technologies, breaking with existing approaches, and pharmaceutical industry was changed that way. This offers release of large sustainability gain and leads to entirely new business models. In this talk, three recent thematic research clusters will be presented, to show how above methodology guides and promotes holistic, transformative research.

Solvent Factory (2017 onward)The FET-Open project ONE-FLOW translates the ‘vertical hierarchy’ of chemical multistep synthesis with its complex machinery into self-organising ‘horizontal hierarchy’ of a compartmentalized flow reactor system (www.one-flow.org). The new concept of a ‘Solvent Factory’ uses multi-phase liquids as integrated reactor-separator; ideally without need of any post-processing and –purification steps.

Fertilizing with Wind (2014 onward)Plasma-enabled chemical nitrogen fixation using air (N₂) allows to manufacture NO/NO₂which can be further converted to yield nitric acid by absorption in aqueous solution. In a similar way, nitrogen and hydrogen can be reacted by plasma catalysis to give ammonia. In this way, fertilisers can be made “out of air” and using wind as green energy source. It will be discussed how this can lead to a transformation of agriculture to a precision horticulture.

Space manufacturing (2018 onward)Space manufacturing is off-earth manufacturing - the advanced technologies are for dual use: also on earth, in deep sea, in dry lands, and other disruptive scenarios. Space medicine is already now a business case and the next cancer drug might be developed in space. A think tank analysis has been made how to make medicines and nanoformulations stable to cosmic rays. Space mining is at the edge to become a business case. Flow-based extraction of artificial asteroid ores is investigated with coiled micro-flow inverters, posing adjacent metal separation tasks, not known on earth.