HTE and Arkema have concluded a research collaboration in the field of glycerol conversion to acrolein and acrylic acid. The objective of this project consisted of providing performance screening for a variety of new suitable catalysts for conversion reactions of glycerol, a biodiesel by-product derived from biomass, to acrolein and acrylic acid. Arkema, which has already registered a number of patents in this field, opted for the services of HTE’s laboratories in Heidelberg, Germany, which use a proprietary parallel testing technology to accelerate this process of exploration and evaluation, thus moving interesting catalysts more quickly from experimentation towards potential commercialisation. This research collaboration, which began last year, was the first high throughput experimentation programme of this kind to be undertaken by Arkema. „The greatest advantage of using HTE’s technology has been the vast amount of time saved during this project. By using this approach we have been able to produce results in a matter of months. This would normally have taken over two years using conventional testing equipment,“ says Jean-Luc Dubois, Scientific Director at Arkema.
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