Vision

The overall vision of the group is to exploit new technology and processes to enable South Africa to more efficiently manufacture a range of chemical products in order to make the country more self-reliant and enhance research capacity development in this area.  Key areas include:

Continuous flow (or micro reaction) systems have been used in many different chemical reactions within academia; the results conclusively demonstrate that this technology offers many advantages in achieving cleaner, more atom efficient and chemically selective syntheses. These advantages can be attributed to the unique operating conditions associated with flow reactors in which reaction conditions, such as temperature, pressure, stoichiometry and residence time can be very accurately controlled within the high surface to volume environment that the reactor channels provide.  The research group will significantly advance the existing research and training programmes of the Nelson Mandela University. As such, the group will make a substantial contribution to:

• Chemistry research conducted within micro reactors
• The development of new processing technologies exploiting micro-structured reactors and small production platforms
• The training of process chemists who are capable of exploiting continuous-flow production technologies.