Telephone (+49)231 755-2339
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Laboratory of Plant and Process Design Emil-Figge-Str. 70 Geschossbau 2 44227 Dortmund Germany
Room G2-R3.20
Theodor Heuss Gymnasium,Waltrop (Germany)
B.Sc. Biochemical Engineering Studies, TU Dortmund University,Bachelor thesis: Start-Up of a Miniplant for the Continuous Processing of Binary Reaction Mixtures by Means of scCO2
M. Sc. Biochemical Engineering Studies, TU Dortmund University,Master thesis: Measuring and Modeling the Phase Behavior and Drug Release of Solid Dispersions
Field of research: Development and Scale-Up of gassing crystallization processes
The application of crystallization in biotechnological processes is limited due to no reliable scale-up methods from laboratory to industrial scale. Especially in case of big molecules and substances with agglomeration tendency there is a lack of transferability. There is no method available to control the process and get a constant product quality. Up-to-date, the method of choice is to control a crystallization process is seeding with difficult produced seed crystals. In order to avoid the risk of contamination due to seed crystals induced nucleation methods like gassing or insonation can be used, but these have not been proved in industrial scale yet.
Objective of the project is the development of a laboratory method that enables a reliable scale-up of crystallization processes. A particular emphasis should be put on the induced nucleation process gassing to ensure constant product quality like crystal form, mean crystal size, crystal size distribution and purity. The scale-up concept is based on the idea to find a key-factor for gassing crystallization, which is suitable to control product quality. A first step will be to characterize the gassing process due to the influence of several gassing parameters (gas flow, gassing period, initial supersaturation, stirrer speed) on the total bubble surface, which is known to act as surface for heterogeneous nucleation. Target values are characteristic diameters (d50, d90), the crystal size distribution (d90-d10) and the cooling profile. With the help of statistical analysis tools, heuristics should be derived to find suitable gassing parameters to ensure constant product quality on different scales.
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