Photocatalytic reactions are a hot topic at the moment, but the transition from laboratory scale to industrial scale remains a challenge. The PhotoScale consortium aims to design a photospinning disc reactor that will allow pharmaceutically interesting photocatalytic reactions to be carried out on a relatively large scale.

‘When photocatalysis emerged in the 1970s, it died a quiet death partly due to a lack of technological progress’, says Timothy Noël, professor of flow chemistry at the University of Amsterdam and one of the lead researchers of the PhotoScale consortium. He has recently noticed that photocatalysis is becoming a booming business. ‘The technology has come a long way since then. We are using this progress ourselves in the consortium, as we want to move to the production stage.’