Parimala Shivaprasad is a postgraduate research student at the Department of Chemical Engineering at University of Bath. Having completed both Bachelor’s and Master’s degree in Chemical Engineering from India, she moved to the UK in 2015 to start her PhD with a research scholarship from the university. Her research aims to integrate sustainability into current chemical processing techniques through novel catalyst and reactor design. Though the current focus is on pharmaceutical industries, the project can be extended to a diverse range of chemical industries. Parimala is also an avid science communicator and has engaged the public with her research in
various events like Pint of Science, Science Show-off and Three Minute Thesis. She is also a member of the Student Women Engineering Society at Bath and is involved in various STEM outreach activities for young girls. As a parallel interest, she is also in the process of validating her start-up with the support of the university’s Innovation Centre. In her free time, she enjoys reading, listening to music, cooking and travelling.
Presentation Title: Novel Metal-Enzyme Catalyst for One-Pot Dynamic Resolution in a Spinning Cloth Disc
Reactor.
The major crux with catalysts employed on an industrial scale is their non-compatibility and the number of processing steps necessary for intermediate product purification and catalyst recovery. Continuous flow across two or more catalysts spatially separated or cascade chemistry is a novel approach which is not extensively researched. The spinning mesh disc reactor (SMDR) is one such reactor which can be used to augment process intensification,
as it uses centrifugal forces to allow an even spread of a thin film across a spinning horizontal disc covered by a replaceable cloth.A two-step Dynamic Kinetic Resolution was chosen as the model reaction for ease of comparison with literature. Step-1 involved the formation of nitroalcohol racemic mixture catalysed by immobilised copper triflate and Step-2 facilitated dynamic kinetic resolution of the racemic mixture, catalysed by immobilised lipase. The reaction in batch mode was carried out for 24 hours, with continuous shaking. The SMDR was used for cascade reactions by arranging the two different catalytic cloths on top of each other to ensure liquid penetration through both cloth layers. Conversion in batch and SMDR were in good agreement with literature, with reaction time in SMDR being significantly lesser than that in batch mode.
