By using a packed-bed reactor with a palladium/charcoal catalyst and ammonium formate or triethylsilane as hydrogen/hydride source, various functional groups including nitro groups, azides and alkenes can be efficiently reduced by a transfer hydrogenation process under mild conditions in a simple flow system.

Packed beds are essentially heterogeneous on a pellet scale. For random packed beds this heterogeneity causes a statistical character both on a pellet and bed scale. We discuss experimental results which deal with bed-scale statistics. For packed beds on a laboratory scale, the results indicate that the beclscale statistical behaviour introduces a spread up to a factor of three in correlations ...

A mesophilic unsaturated flow (trickle bed) reactor was designed and tested for H2 production via fermentation of glucose. The reactor consisted of a column packed with glass beads and inoculated with a pure culture (Clostridium acetobutylicum ATCC 824). A defined medium containing glucose was fed at a flow rate of 1.6 mL/min (0.096 L/h) into the capped reactor, producing a hydraulic retention ...

This article describes the use of biofilm reactors for the production of various chemicals by fermentation and wastewater treatment. Biofilm formation is a natural process where microbial cells attach to the support (adsorbent) or form flocs/aggregates (also called granules) without use of chemicals and form thick layers of cells known as "biofilms." As a result of biofilm formation, cell densi...