Research

The chemical industry faces the key challenge of making its processes climate-neutral in the coming decades. A promising approach to decarbonizing traditional synthetic routes is the increased use of electrochemical processes. Additionally, electrochemical reactions offer the advantage of replacing toxic or hazardous oxidizing or reducing agents. In hydrogenation reactions, the required hydrogen can be supplied directly in situ in the form of protons via water electrolysis at room temperature. This provides a safe, gentle, and environmentally friendly alternative to thermochemical processes, as it avoids extreme pressures and temperatures.

Despite these advantages, the share of electrochemical processes in industrial production has so far been negligible. One reason for this is the difficulty in scaling up: In the laboratory, electroorganic reactions are usually characterized in batch cells, but scaling them up is unattractive. Flow cells therefore dominate in industrial production.

However, transferring the optimal reaction parameters from batch to flow cells is not trivial: Differences in hydrodynamics, mass transfer, electrode geometry, and cell architecture often lead to unpredictable changes in conversion and selectivity, making a simple “batch-to-flow” scale-up impossible and necessitating a new, resource-intensive screening process. Against this backdrop, my research focuses increasingly on the fundamentals of the transferability of electrochemical reaction parameters between batch and flow cells.