The scope of the collaborative project is to develop a technical project management methodology to be able to speed up the decision through the process intensification. For the industrials, process intensification has to allow decreasing the time to market for a product by designing the most optimum process in term of energy consumption, safety, environment considerations, investment cost… The main objective of the project “PROCIP” is therefore the development of a general process intensification methodology which includes a software implementation as well as validation and support via efficient experimental techniques. To reach the objectives fixed by this project, multidisciplinary skills are necessary (skills in process, in modelling, in PI technologies, in project development, in industrial investment). So, we gathered these skills around the consortium: - Of industrials: BlueStar Silicones France and Rhodia; - Of SME: Processium, - And of complementary laboratories in Chemical engineering : Nancy-LRGP, Toulouse-LGC, Lyon-LGPC The association of the skills of these participants appeared as an evidence by their domains of research concerning the process intensification and their objectives to develop industrial demonstrations. The project is organized in 3 main technical parts: - Tools and methodologies to measure the basic data of the chemistry or process involved, - Characterization of equipments, in the field of process intensification : develop standardized methods to compare equipments performances as heat exchange capacity, mixing efficiency, mass transfer coefficient… - Software for Best Available Technology orientation The objective fits with the recommendations of the call as it will bring a methology to help the process engineer to think process innovation differently and to share the BAT sooner in the project development phase with the chemists. On an industrial plan, this work will permit to improve greatly the design of new processes thanks to a powerful software tool to look for the opportunity to implement intensified technologies. The survey of industrial cases will be done during the project in order to improve the relevance of the results. The industrial applicability will be therefore very fast. The large panel of studied technologies will facilitate portability on a large domain in chemical and pharmaceutical industries …. From the network of the partners and following meetings with Axelera Steering committee on “Factory of the Future”, others industrials are interested to test the software developed in the Procip Project. It is a part of the dissemination but the evaluations will be used to improve and tackle the pitfalls and weaknesses of the software. On a commercial plan, after the end of the project, Processium will continue the tool improvement in order to make a decision aiding tool usable for new reactive process developments and possibly to spread its application fields while integrating a systemic process vision (separation, environment, chemistry,…). This tool will accompany efforts already hired by Processium in separation process synthesis.

The PolySafe proposal is entitled “Safe operation of an intensified continuous heat-exchanger reactor for polyphasic reactions”. The partners of the project are: 1. LGC (Laboratoire de Génie Chimique): research laboratory recognized in the field of Process Engineering, which includes a strong activity in the fields of intensified reactors and process safety. 2. INERIS (Institut National de l'Environnement industriel et des RISques): a public institute of an industrial and commercial character, under the supervision of the French Ministry of the environment. It has a recognised role in the assessment and prevention of technological and environmental risks for both environmental and human protection. 3. CEA (Commissariat à l’Energie Atomique) / LITEN (Laboratoire d’Innovation des Technologies pour les Energies nouvelles et les Nanomatériaux): its mission is to develop new technologies for energy (fuel cell, hydrogen production, biomass, solar technologies). Two departments are involved in this project: the DTBH/LCTA (for materials and process aspects) and the DTS/LETh (for heat-exchanger reactor design and functional tests aspects). SDMS Technologies, a leader company in the field of high technology equipments manufacturing, has expressed a full support to the PolySafe project and proposes to include the manufacture of PolySafe heat-exchangers/reactors in their industrial offer. 4. BSF (BlueStar Silicones France): one of the world industrial leaders in the field of the silicone technology. The main production sites of the company are in France. Its research and development centre (about one hundred scientists), is located on the industrial site of Saint-Fons. The general objective of the project is to demonstrate the inherently safer characteristics and versatility of an innovative intensified continuous heat-exchanger/reactor (HEX). The studied class of reactions proposed by BlueStar Silicones France, involving polyphasic mixtures, arises from the domain of the chemistry of silicones. More precisely, it concerns the hydrolysis of chlorosilanes which is a step for the production of silicone polymers. At present, these reactions are carried out in a batch reactor or in a loop reactor with an external heat-exchanger to evacuate the heat generated. The goal is to operate in an intensified process in order to complete the reaction and to eliminate the exothermic solubilisation step of hydrochloric acid produced. The expected advances are safety improvement (control of thermal risk, suppression of corrosion likely to produce chlorine leaks), environmental impact reduction (less by-products, no treatment step of solvents) and economical gain (chlorine recovery). Moreover, an aim of the project is to design and build a heat-exchanger/reactor by diffusion welding process using Hot Isostatic Pressing (HIP). This technique, well acquired by the CEA, has proven its technological and economical merits for chemical heat-exchanger/reactors involved in previous projects and allows a straight forward scale-up of the HEX to the industrial scale. According to the general goal of the proposal, the main focuses concern process risk analysis, modelling and simulating in failure modes, pressure holding of devices and application to polyphasic reactions (L/L and L/L/G), what will underline the HEX versatility. The emphasis is with respect to less pollution, less expendable material and energy for innovative chemistry as well as new process design able to operate a sustainable chemistry.

The hydrosilylation of olefins, industrially catalysed by a platinum complex, requires a high annual investment in this noble metal, because it is lost with the reaction products. The objective of this project is to study two ways to overcome this problem: either heterogenizing the platinum to maintain it durably in the reactor, or replacing the platinum by a more economic catalyst, with no impact to the environment. The first part corresponds to the work initiated at the end of HEXOSIC project, One of the objectives of this project was to use heterogeneous catalysts in a silicon carbide continuous reactor. However, the use of commercial heterogeneous catalysts in continuous reactors was found unsuitable, mainly because of the platinum leaching, Besides, a new synthesis method was developped to avoid leaching. The optimisation of this preparation will be studied (hydrophobicity, pore size...) as well as the deposition of the catalyst as a thin layer on structured substrates. Doping the platinum with another metal will also be studied as a way to reduce the platinum outstanding. In a second more exploratory part, the total replacement of the platinum by a cheap metal with no impact to the environment will be studied. The methodology will consist in the synthesis of nanoparticles (iron, copper...). The catalytic activity of all the synthesized catalysts will be measured through the model reaction of 1-octene hydrosilyltaion in a semi-batch reactor. The best catalysts will be used in a continuous reactor to evaluate their lifetime and their potential productivity. According to the catalyst nature, its preliminary shaping/immobilisation on substrates will be studied. Finally, the catalysts will also be evaluated in other hydrosilylation reactions. For confidentiality reasons, the methodology foreseen to immobilise the nanoparticles on supports can not be detailed here.