The Laboratory for Chemical Technology (LCT) is a unit within the Department of Chemical Engineering (IR12), Faculty of Engineering, of Ghent University. Chemical reaction engineering and heterogeneous catalysis in general and, in particular, the kinetics of chemical reactions are major axes of the research in this Laboratory.

Resources

The LCT consists of four tenured faculty members, five post-doc researchers, some 20 PhD-students and 8 technicians. In total 20 lab-scale setups and two pilot plant units mainly aimed at kinetic experiments are available. One fifth of the funding is originating from industrial collaborations.

Expertise

The research at the LCT is focused on the kinetics of industrial reactions. The research aims at a better understanding and optimization of existing industrial processes and at the development of novel technologies. The catalytic and/or reactor aspects are essential in most of the projects. Kinetic studies are not limited to the determination of empirical correlations between the reaction rate and the reaction conditions but based on the fundamental knowledge of the elementary steps. Kinetic parameters are obtained from a limited number of well-designed experiments. Ab initio calculations are also used to obtain information on kinetic parameters. The interaction between transport and reaction phenomena is studied both on the scale of the catalyst pellet and on the reactor scale. For the design and the simulation of industrial reactors, the Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) approach is applied. The kinetic modeling of reactions in mixtures containing several hundreds of molecules belongs to the specific expertise of the laboratory.