Das Projekt "Risk assessment in production and use of nanoparticles with development of preventive measures and practice codes (NANOSAFE)" wird vom Umweltbundesamt gefördert und von Nanogate Technologies GmbH durchgeführt. Objective: The proposed project assesses risks involved in production, handling and use of nanoparticles in industrial processes and products, as well as in consumer products. The objectives are to assemble available information on the possible hazards of nanoparticles, to evaluate risks to workers and consumers, to recommend regulatory measures and codes of practice to obviate any danger. The group of nine partners includes laboratories developing nanoparticles or materials, companies presently making or using nano materials, medical research laboratories in pneumology and epidemology, and a large national industry professional association. Working groups consisting of several partners will be formed to collect and evaluate available information on different aspects of the subject. At the conclusion of the project a Conference will be held for presentation of the results and recommendations, including proposed regulations, preventive measures and codes of good practice.
Das Projekt "Novel eco-efficient oxidation processes based on h2o2 synthesis on catalytic membranes (NEOPS)" wird vom Umweltbundesamt gefördert und von INSTM - Consorzio Interuniversitario Nazionale per la Scienza e Tecnologia dei Materiali durchgeführt. Background: Hydrogen peroxide is an important inorganic chemical. Its use is very universal though most of the produced peroxide is consumed for bleaching of textiles and paper. The main advantage of using this particular oxidizing agent is because it is reduced to water, which is obviously an innocuous product in the waste water. Some other applications are production of peroxocompounds (peroxocarbonates, peroxoborates) used in detergents, epoxidating agent for alkenes, synthesis of caprolactam, preserving compound in food inddustry etc. Though there are a number of different routes to manufacture hydrogen peroxide nowadays it is solely produced by autooxidation of antrachinone derivatives. This procedure was implemented by I.G. Farbenindustrie at the end of World war II. The process is composed of several steps depicted bellow. At first step 2-alkylantrachinone is dissolved in a mixture of organic solvents (mostly alcohol/hydrocarbon or ester/hydrocarbon) and reduced to a corresponding chinol by hydrogen in the presence of a catalyst composed of Raney nickel and palladium on a suitable support. The suspended catalyst is then separated from the reaction mixture, and in the second step chinol derivative is oxidized in a stream of air. For this step no catalyst is required. The resulting chinone derivative is used in the first step again. The hydrogen peroxide which is formed during this step is then extracted from the solvents by water and concentrated to about 30 % aq. solution by distillation at reduced pressure.
There are several side reactions that occur in hydrogenation step which increase the cost of hydrogen peroxide by consuming the chinone derivative. For this reason the economics of hydrogenation is critical for this process. It is necessary to maintain such reaction conditions under which the rates of side reactions are kept at minimum since the cost of the antrachinone derivative and solvents is about 100 times more than that of the produced peroxide.
Objective: There is a possibility to synthesize hydrogen peroxide directly from the elements. The reaction where gaseous hydrogen reacts with gaseous oxygen yielding hydrogen peroxide is highly exothermic. The reaction is catalyzed by a noble metal preferably Pd. One of the problems associated with this method is the very slow reaction rate of the formation. Also the catalyst is fairly active in decomposing the hydrogen peroxide. There have been a lot of reports about the synthesis of hydrogen peroxide with suspended catalysts. The idea of this project is to develop a two step integrated process where in the first step diluted solution of hydrogen peroxide is produced on the TCM. In the second step the diluted hydrogen peroxide solution is used for some selective oxidations e.g. propene epoxidation or benzene hydroxylation.