Magnetic Resonance Imaging could mean greener chemical plants

Phil Black - PII Editor 04/03/2014

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Magnetic Resonance Imaging, a technique familiar for its use looking inside biological systems, is now being used to look inside chemical processes in the hope of making greener technologies.

Professor Lynn Gladden CBE, recipient of the Royal Society Bakerian Lecture 2014, will be speaking at the Royal Society on March 4th about her work developing MRI methods to understand processes happening inside chemical reactors.

What goes on inside reactors is surprisingly poorly understood because of its complexity and at the moment is represented by predictions or oversimplifications. To ensure that the right products are made and that they are made safely, engineers have no choice but to ‘over-design’ reactors which means they can often be energy-inefficient.

“There is increasing pressure to design chemical plants and many other chemical and materials processing operations so that they are both energy-efficient and produce products which satisfy ever-more stringent specifications,” Professor Gladden says. “This requires an understanding of how complex molecular systems flow and react in different process environments.”

MRI techniques give engineers a unique tool to gain this understanding of what’s happening inside reactors in incredible detail. This new insight could lead to the design of a generation of more efficient and selective catalyst and reactor systems to deliver leaner and greener chemical plants.

Just as MRI helps doctors diagnose disease, it could also help chemical engineers figure out how to design reactors more efficiently for a new generation of greener chemical plants. In the same way that MRI can peer inside human bodies to observe blood flow and drug delivery, it can now be used to monitor how liquid and gases interact in reactors giving clues about how well catalysts are working inside.

New techniques allow scientists to observe a huge range of flow fields from sluggish movement of microns per second (which is between how fast hair and bamboo each grow) to liquids and gases moving at many metres per second. Ultrafast MRI techniques collect real time images to give important insights into the behaviour of reacting gases and liquids. In many cases no other measurement techniques currently exist that are able to reveal such detail.

These new resolutions in space and time could help engineers unlock the secret to attaining higher catalytic conversions in industrial reactors. With greater insight into the processes going on inside reactors engineers may be able to find ways to achieve the high catalytic conversion seen on small scales in the lab, on an industrial scale.