2 Minuten mit Professor Rodrigo Octavio Mendonça Alves de Souza, Ph.D.

The development of continuous-flow technology allows reagents to be introduced at various points along a process stream, enabling interaction under highly controlled conditions and allowing a truly intensified process. When compared to batch processes, flow processes have minimal scale-up issues. Instead of scaling up for mass production by increasing reactor size as with batch processes, flow reactors can be scaled up by introducing more reactors in parallel (scaling out) while maintaining excellent mixing and heat transfer. Here in we present our strategy for developing an intensified process starting from vegetable oils to produce either alkanes derived from fatty acids through a chemo enzymatic hydrolysis/photodecarboxylation cascade reaction or a mixture of azelaic acid (C9 dicarboxylic acid), pelargonic acid (C9 carboxilic acid), hexanoic acid and malonic acid (C3 dicarboxilic acid) which can be used as polymer building blocks by establishing a hydrolysis/ozonolysis process.