The aim of the EU project F3Factory was to increase efficiency and flexibility in the development of efficient and sustainable processes in the chemical industry: The factory of the future is more effective, more flexible and, above all, spares resources far better than current standards.
Projektbeschreibung
The project ran from June 1,2009 to July 31,2013 with a budget of approx. 30 M€, 18 M€ EU funding under the 7th Framework Programme. F3 Factory stands for "Flexible, Fast and Future Factory": The consortium of 26 partners wants to strengthen the global technological leadership of the European chemical industry in the long term and improve competitiveness by means of faster and more flexible production processes. The aim is to methodically develop the modular continuously operated factory (F3 Factory), to standardize related processes and interfaces and to demonstrate the F3 Factory for specific products. The efficiency and scalability of world-scale plants should be combined with the flexibility of a batch plant. To this end, holistic strategies for process intensification are to be applied in order to use raw materials and energies more sparingly. Together, they account for around 70 to 80 percent of the manufacturing costs and thus usually account for considerably more than the cost factor of labor.
F3 Factory also focuses on the development of concrete products such as solvent-free polymers, customized surfactants, high-quality intermediates and innovative materials based on renewable raw materials. The INVITE demonstration and development centre was built as a research company of the TU Dortmund and Bayer Technologies Services at the CHEMPARK Leverkusen.
The IMVT was involved in the development of modular, flexible microstructure reactors in two industrial sample processes (batch-to-conti in the pharmaceutical industry (link: detailed description) and decentralized production of surfactants (detailed description).