Later this year, the country’s first indigenous plant to make an important chemical compound called ‘hydrazine hydrate’ (HH) will become commercially operational through the Gujarat Alkalies & Chemicals Limited (GACL) in Vadodara. This chemical, which has multifarious use in pharmaceuticals, polymer, agro chemical industry and others, is currently being imported in large quantities, and the city-based CSIR-Indian Institute of Chemical Technology (IICT) has played a critical role in the development of the cost-effective ‘HH’ technology through a ‘peroxide-ketazine’ route reducing effluent discharge.
“The process is environmentally friendly, as all the raw materials are recovered and reused without loss in yield and conversion making it very viable”, says IICT former chief scientist K. Ravindranath. For him and the ‘HH’ project team of more than a dozen scientists, it has been more than a decade of painstaking research, spending hours in the laboratory to get the process right.
“We have nurtured this project like a child from 2009 and it has been a fulfilling journey with lots of challenges at every stage from the lab scale to the pilot scale — 10 grams to 100 grams, 5 kg to 10,000 tonnes, as we have to be very careful with the commercial scale-up design,” he explained.
