FRIAS Lunch Lectures - Resilience in Chemical Systems and Processes

Prof. Ingo Krossing
Chemistry, University Freiburg
Lunch Lecture recorded on February 11, 2021 

Resilience in Chemical Systems and Processes

In this lecture, the connotations of ‘Resilience’ in the context of Chemistry as a Natural Science with large technological applications shall be presented. As such and due to the potentially toxic and dangerous installations to conduct chemical reactions in, chemical industry has long polarized the public. Yet, the potential dangers of many chemical reactions, early on invoked the resilient design of chemical systems, i.e. in the very best interest of the people conducting the reaction, reactors and production sites needed robust and safe. Yet, the resilience of a chemical system may be invoked at the large and macroscopic level, at the micrometer scale or even on the atomistic level. Thus, I will present three examples of chemical systems, in which ‘Resilience’ is achieved on different size scales: First and historically already more than 100 years in place, the large scale Haber-Bosch-process for ammonia production (200 mio. t per year), next the self-healing adaptive polymers active at the microlevel and last, not least, the resilient atomistic / nanoscale architecture of a lithium ion battery that combines seemingly impossible material features.