Prof. Michael Schlüter, head of the Institute of Multiphase Flows at the Hamburg University of Technology, spent the week of 11–15 May 2026 at the Department of Energy, to see the project’s facilities and to discuss the next steps of the collaboration.
The Hamburg connection is one of the busiest in the project. It produced the thermophysical dataset and the liquid-side mass-transfer coefficients for aqueous ionic-liquid mixtures measured during Alberto Arici’s research stay at the Institute of Multiphase Flows, the MRI-based gas holdup measurements in the rectangular column, and two of the five contributions the group brought to CHISA 2026.
The visit was given to the laboratory and to what comes after the work already done together: the facilities were shown and run, and the shape of the next phase of the collaboration was discussed.
On 15 May, in the Vento room of the EN:lab building, Prof. Schlüter also gave a departmental seminar, The adventurous journey of a bubble through a gassed stirred tank reactor. Its argument: the temporally and spatially averaged quantities normally used to design and operate multiphase reactors — dispersion coefficients, residence time distributions, energy dissipation rates — assume a homogeneously mixed system and so miss the inhomogeneities a bubble or a reacting particle actually passes through. Following the individual path instead, with 4D particle tracking velocimetry and Lagrangian sensor particles, and analysing it with Lagrangian coherent structures or mean age theory, is what makes those changing conditions visible, and with them the real limits of scaling up.