Novel Process Windows

Volker Hessel, born 1964, is the Director of R&D and Head of the Chemical Process Technology Department at the Institute for Microtechnology Mainz GmbH (IMM), Germany. His department focuses on mixing, fine chemistry, and energy generation by fuel processing using microstructured reactors. He was awarded his Ph.D. from the University of Mainz in organic chemistry in 1993, investigating structure-property relations of supramolecular structures. After having been appointed Group Leader for Microreaction Technology at the IMM in 1996, he became head of the newly founded Department of Microreaction Technology in 1999. He is author of more than 150 peer-reviewed publications in the fields of organic chemistry and chemical micro process engineering, 200 papers in total, five books and 15 patents. In July 2005, Prof. Dr. Hessel was appointed as part-time professor for the chair of Micro Process Engineering at Eindhoven University of Technology, TU/e. This professorship is under the umbrella of the Chemical Reactor Engineering group of Prof. Dr.ir. Jaap Schouten in the Department of Chemical Engineering and Chemistry. In September, 2009, he was appointed an honorary professorship at the Technical Chemistry Department at Technical University of Darmstadt.

Dr.-Ing. habil. Norbert Kockmann, born 1966, studied mechanical engineering at Technical University of Munich and received his diploma in 1991. Dr. Kockmann was awarded his doctorate thesis in 1996 on fouling in falling film evaporators and its mitigation from The University of Bremen. In 1997, Dr. Kockmann worked as a project engineer at Messer Griesheim, Germany and was project manager for air separation units and a syngas plant. After 5 years industrial experience, he formed a research group for micro process engineering at the IMTEK Albert-Ludwig University of Freiburg, and was awarded his habilitation in 2007 on transport phenomena in micro process engineering. Since October 2007, Dr. Kockmann is senior researcher at Lonza Ltd, Visp, Switzerland and responsible for microreactor development and continuous-flow reactor technology. His fields of research comprise micro process engineering for mixing, heat transfer, fine chemistry and pharmaceutics, and micro reactor development and fabrication. Dr. Kockmann is author or co-author of more than 30 journal publications and 65 conference contributions, five book chapters, and two books. In 2009, Dr. Kockmann received the ASME award ICNMM09 Outstanding Researcher in Transport Phenomena in Microchannels.

Dana Kralisch, born in 1973, studied environmental chemistry at the Friedrich-Schiller-University (FSU), Jena, Germany. After two years consulting in environmental analytics at the Agency for Agriculture of the Federal State of Thuringia, she started to work as a research assistant at the Institute of Technical and Environmental Chemistry (FSU) in 2002. In her work she concentrated on the integration of sustainability criteria into chemical process development with a focus on micro reaction technology and ionic liquids. In 2006, she was awarded her PhD from the School of Chemical and Earth Sciences (FSU).Since 2007, she is leading the Green Process Engineering and Evaluation Research Group at the Institute of Technical and Environmental Chemistry. She is currently working on the coupling of life cycle assessment and green chemical process design in the framework of the German Novel Process Windows cluster and in the context of nanocellulose research. Dr. Kralisch is author or co-author of 13 per-reviewed publications, 4 book chapters, 27 conference contributions and two patents.