• Investment in expansion and new construction to optimize research, development, and production of fixed-bed catalysts
• Systematic expansion of expertise and capacities for chemical catalysts
• Fast and accident-free construction phase

Evonik has now launched an additional production area and erected a new building to house research, development, and scale-up operations for fixed bed catalysts at its Marl site, where it has been manufacturing catalysts for the past 75 years.

The specialty-chemicals group has made a low double-digit million euro investment to expand its existing production capacities and erect a new building for operations revolving around the continued improvement of fixed-bed catalysts.

Explaining the investment, Johannes Ohmer, member of the Board of Management of Evonik Resource Efficiency GmbH, said, ”Innovations and constant product optimizations are what’s at the heart of the catalysts business. Excellent catalysts are critical to achieving resource efficiency in the chemicals business.”

Fixed-bed catalysts are used mostly in the large-scale continual processes involved in the manufacture of base chemicals. The new scale-up plant is available to research and development staff for the development of catalyst formulas at the laboratory scale before using pilot units to up-scale those formulas and optimize them for application in commercial production.

“For Evonik, expansion of the plant represents a further step in the course of systematic expansion of its expertise and capacities in the field of chemical catalysts,” said Dr. Wilfried Eul, head of the Evonik Catalysts Business Line. “The aim is to maintain our ability to supply customers in the relevant markets with tailored catalysts produced at technologically sophisticated and cost-efficiently operated manufacturing facilities.”

The expansion and new-construction measures have also created spatial links between all areas – the advantages being closer working proximity, easier enablement of parallel operations of machines and systems, and improved communication among staff. And the outfitting of existing facilities with state-of-the-art control technology has put capacity utilization on an even more efficient footing.

In the production area, Evonik has set up an additional facility for the optimized forming of catalysts for customer delivery and application. Outfitted with highly innovative technology, this new facility enables much improved material flow for the multiple processes involved, thereby doing away almost completely with the need for manual material transport. And new analysis and measuring techniques now allow the process to be precision-controlled.