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—Roberta Manno, University of Zaragoza “One day a dozen years ago, Percy Spencer was visiting the lab where magnetrons, the power tubes of radar sets, were being tested. Suddenly, he felt a peanut bar had begun to melt in his pocket…” What would you do in this situation? Well Percy Spencer sent a boy out for popcorn’s box. When he ...

Yesterday, the COSMIC Summer School in Ultrasound and Microwaves for Chemical Processing started. 38 participants followed the lectures on Introduction to ultrasound by Prof. J-Y. Hihn. Today they will follow lectures on ultrasound assisted separation processes and will be introduced to microwave technology. In the afternoon, the first lab sessions will start so that they will also experience the world ...

 — Luca Panariello, UCL Ultrasound is sound waves with frequencies higher than the upper audible limit of human hearing. It is no different from “normal” audible sound in its physical properties, except that humans cannot hear it. The feasibility of converting sound into chemistry was demonstrated more than 80 years ago, when Lord Rayleigh postulated the existence of cavitation bubbles. Ultrasound ...

Drug discovery Online published an article about the most important steps and mistakes the pharmaceutical industry can make when they want to switch from batch to continuous production of drugs.

— Fabio Grimaldi, UCL The chemical process industry—and in particular the fine chemicals and pharmaceuticals industries—is experiencing a transition from batch to continuous production. Currently, the conventional technologies in these sectors tend to be batch type, combined with mechanical mixing and conduction-based heat transfer, inherently leading to poor process control. As part of the Marie Skłodowska-Curie Horizon 2020 European program, the COSMIC ...

The registrations for the COSMIC Summer School are almost full. At the moment only 3 places are left. So if you want to subscribe, be fast! The summer school on Ultrasound and Microwaves for Chemical Processing will be organized in cooperation with the European Sonochemistry Society (ESS) and AMPERE. This summer school will address the use of ultrasound and microwave ...

And finally, the rest of us, dealing with the design and development of ultrasound and microwave flow reactors as well as the development of methodologies to evaluate the technical and sustainability performance of these developed technologies. Dwayne Stephens: On completion of my masters in computational fluid dynamics I had to face a fact: I had barely scratched the surface of the ...

On June 2nd, 2017 Jinu Joseph John (Department of Chemical Engineering) successfully defended and obtained his PhD degree at KU Leuven. The topic of Jinu Joseph John PhD dissertation was Ultrasound-Assisted Liquid-liquid Extraction in Microchannels. Publications in the context of this PhD John, J.J., Kuhn, S., Braeken, L. , Van Gerven, T. (2016).  Ultrasound assisted liquid–liquid extraction in microchannels—A direct ...

We listed some interesting upcoming conferences and summer schools in 2017. Please click on the infographic to open the pdf file where the links to the conferences are available. To visit the webpage of a conference, click on the flags.

A fifth research line in SIM² KU Leuven has just been launched. Process intensification aims at the development of chemical process technology which allows chemical processing with high materials and energy efficiency.