CASE STUDY
®
Dr. Peter Witte, Research Chemist at BASF
“Reaxys is an excellent tool for research chemists.”
SUSTAINABLE CHEMISTRY AT BASF
BASF is the leading chemical company, with facilities around the globe working
on every imaginable application of chemistry. With a strong focus on environmental
protection and social responsibility, BASF creates chemistry for a sustainable future.
CASE STUDY: Dr. Peter Witte, BASF
“Reaxys saves us time by giving us a
detailed overview of the search results,
not just a list of literature.”
– Dr. Peter Witte, Research Chemist at BASF
Covering the full range of chemistry
Research and development at BASF is
divided into five segments: Oil & Gas,
focusing on exploration and production in
gas-rich regions worldwide; Agricultural
Solutions, producing chemicals for
protecting and enhancing the quality of
crops; Performance Products, providing
stability, improved quality and even color
to everyday items ranging from fuels and
lubricants to pharmaceuticals and foods;
Chemicals, covering the fundamentals
of chemistry, from solvents and glues
to raw materials for detergents, fibers
and paints; and Functional Materials &
Solutions, offering system solutions, services and innovative products for internal
and external customers.
To get a better sense of chemistry
research at BASF, we spoke with Dr. Peter
Witte, a research chemist and project
leader in BASF’s Functional Materials
& Solutions division. He is based in De
Meern in the Netherlands. We talked
about some of the ways that his group
works with internal and external customers and the role of research solutions such
as Reaxys in the R&D process.
Could you tell us about your role
at BASF?
I’m one of ten project leaders in the
Catalysts group of the Functional
Materials & Solutions division in De
Meern. We develop catalysts directly for
customers in numerous industries. We
also serve some of the other BASF divisions, providing them with what
they need.
As project leader, it’s my job to come
up with concepts for our research. I
also drive the work, making sure we
meet all our goals within budget and
on time. I’m involved in every phase of
R&D — discovery, decisions about which
compounds and procedures to focus on,
development, and release.
What types of project are you
involved in?
Essentially, we deal with two types of
project. In one, the customer comes to us
with a well-defined process that is already
running and requests new catalysts for
reactions within that process. In that
case, the customer has very defined goals
and it’s up to us to find a way to make
those happen.
In the other type of project, there’s no
customer, at least not initially. It’s more
like pure research — not quite science for
the sake of science, because our goal is to
have something that we can commercialize. In these projects, we test much more
general principles, such as the possibilities
of a new catalyst.
What have you been working
on recently?
For the past few years, we’ve been working on a new type of catalyst. It had come
up in the literature and there was a lot of
buzz around it. We decided to assess just
how advantageous it might be and look at
ways to mass synthesize it.
How does literature play a role in
your research?
As a project leader, it’s up to me to go
through the literature during the planning phase of the project. It’s during that
discovery phase that Reaxys is so useful.
Before we even start the project, we look
at the literature to see what’s already
known on the topic and what’s going on
in the world of research. Reaxys lets us
quickly get all the relevant data and citations, and that in turn supports a quick
decision process.
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CASE STUDY: Dr. Peter Witte, BASF
Figure 1. The preparation of the
NanoSelect catalyst. Dr. Witte’s group at
the BASF De Meern site was responsible
for the discovery of this important new
catalyst. Learn more about this and other
BASF research at basf.com.
Image reproduced with permission
from BASF.
Once we have established the synthesis
pathways for the compound of interest,
we move into the lab for the development
phase. Literature still has a role to
play — I check back to see what other
research labs around the world are publishing in the same area — but we’re less
likely to look for data unless a procedure
fails unexpectedly.
How does Reaxys help you with
this research?
Reaxys helps us retrieve data quickly.
The information that I found in my short
searches with Reaxys was very useful for
me. It has some really nice search
features that make it easier to get what
I’m looking for.
In particular, I find Reaxys useful because
we can look at reactions and then find
the catalysts that are most suitable for
that reaction. Heterogeneous catalysts
can’t be described by a simple formula.
The possibility to search by reaction and
find catalysts is a great advantage. If we
find something interesting, we can look
at how it is prepared by going deeper into
the details of the catalyst prep.
Are you using Reaxys in your
current project?
The project actually started before we
had access to Reaxys, so it wasn’t used
in our initial discovery phase. However,
if I’d known about Reaxys then, I would
definitely have used it to help find the
solvents, reaction conditions and so on
for the catalyst.
We’ve patented and published our prep
for this catalyst — it’s under the name
NanoSelect — and now we have a new
type of reaction we want to look at. We’re
using Reaxys to see if we will end up with
a catalyst that is similar to anything that’s
been described. We’re looking at reaction
conditions and seeing what we can do
at low temperature and pressure. We’re
also looking at the possibilities to use
palladium rather than platinum. That’s
all standard research for a new reaction.
We’re also investigating the possibilities
for sustainable production — that’s very
important to BASF as a company.
Reaxys is proving very useful to us in this
discovery phase of the new stage of our
project. I really like working with it.
Why do you like Reaxys?
Reaxys saves us time by giving us detailed
overview of the search results, not just
a list of literature. Other products don’t
retrieve the data in the same way. We
have the possibility to control the search
through a number of options and we get
back data and citations that are of real
use to us. Reaxys is an excellent tool for
research chemists.
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May 2015
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