Life Sciences

As the world's population grows, so does the demand for food, living space, and arable land. Plants do not only serve as food; they are also used as renewable alternative for fossil feedstock. Thus, highly efficient but eco-friendly crop cultivation will become increasingly important for a sustainable future.

The environment requires efficient agrichemicals that work at low doses with minimized negative environmental impact. Our catalysts help to produce such cutting-edge ingredients through highly selective processes, and your business can profit from our cost-efficient solution.

We support a wide range of catalytic reactions with our extensive experience in hydrogenation, oxidation, isomerization or dehydrogenation of functional groups and in CC-coupling reactions. Our Product Finder can help you select the right catalyst from our broad portfolio of proprietary catalysts for many common reaction types used in the production of agrichemicals.

Benefits at a glance by choosing our catalysts:

• We support your production chain flexibly from our global network of production facilities.
• You can choose from a comprehensive portfolio of proprietary catalysts for many common reaction types, or our application experts help you find or fine-tune a perfect match for your process.
• We offer comprehensive metal management services and a local closed loop to refine precious metal containing catalysts.

Enhanced consciousness for environmental challenges and changes in consumer preferences have transformed our global food and feed production. As a result, there is a high demand for sustainable healthy nutrition and overall improved food experiences.

Our catalysts can help you create compelling flavors and sweeteners, as well as functional food and dietary supplements. We offer you a wide range of catalysts to enable the best possible route to the desired product. Their high activity, selectivity, and very good filterability are value-creating features.

Polyol sweeteners are manufactured by hydrogenation of natural sugars, facilitated either by a nickel or ruthenium catalyst. We offer different molybdenum promoted activated base metal catalysts (e. g. Metalyst® MC 813) and ruthenium on carbon catalysts (Noblyst® P3060 or Noblyst® P3059) for this purpose that are tailored to specific raw materials and process technologies. Palladium on carbon catalyst from the Noblyst® P1000 series enable the hydrogenation of hops to make the beer more resistant to UV light.

Fats and their calcium salts are used in animal feed to improve pelletization, reduce dusting, increase the energy content and to improve palatability. Full and partial hydrogenation allows the use of local fat and oil sources as well as recycled frying oils. MONCAT™ 2021 is the preferred catalyst for the hydrogenation of triglycerides, and MONCAT™ 1991 is preferred for free fatty acid hydrogenation before conversion to the respective calcium salt.

Your benefits at a glance:

• Get all necessary certificates and documents for the safe use of our catalysts in food applications.
• We provide additional support in selecting a suitable catalyst to enable the best possible synthesis of the desired products.

The pharmaceutical industry is constantly developing new active substances. Also, off-patent generic APIs are manufactured on large scale.  Since most APIs are produced by complex multi-step syntheses, selectivity is the major challenge, and an optimized yield in each step is essential for the economic viability of any synthetic route.

We support both research-focused pharmaceutical originators and Contract Manufacturing Organizations (CMOs) by providing and developing standard and tailor-made catalysts. In addition to catalysts, Evonik now offers normal phase alumina and silica gel for chromatographic separation, purification and decolorization of APIs. 

Removal of protection groups is crucial in producing pharmaceutical compounds. Palladium on carbon from the Noblyst® P1000 series typically achieves excellent results under mild reaction conditions for most deprotection reactions. Noblyst® P1092 is well known for its selective hydrogenation of an aromatic carbonyl to methylene groups. Catalysts from our Noblyst® P8000 series contain a secondary or even tertiary metal to supplement the primary catalytically active precious metal and are designed to further increase the specific selectivity of a catalytic hydrogenation.

Multi-step syntheses may not only require selective catalysts, they can also require powerful purification tools. Chromatocel® 150 Series of aluminas and Chromatocel® S-Series of silica gels are chromatographic media well suited for the separation of a product from impurities in organic solvents. The 150 series of aluminas can be purchased in acidic, basic or neutral grades so that molecules with pH sensitivity can be safely purified. The S-Series of silica gels have a high capacity for impurities, allowing for an efficient separation of polar and charged molecules from other moieties. 

You can search and discover our large variety of catalysts for many other reaction types by using our Product Finder!

Your benefits at a glance:

• We offer precise and quick development or fine-tuning of catalysts and chromatography packing materials to provide the perfect solution for your synthesis challenge. 
• To identify a suitable catalyst  from our extensive proprietary product portfolio, we can offer either our classical Pharma kit with 12 catalyst samples or our High Throughput Testing Unit (HTS) capable of scanning large number of catalysts r to find the most suitable one for your needs. 
• For precious metal containing catalysts, we offer our comprehensive metal management services and a local closed loop for refining precious metal. 
• For normal phase chromatography media, we are one of the world’s largest suppliers of chromatography grade normal phase alumina and silica gels so you can be sure the products you buy from us have the right balance between availability, quality and economics. 

Edible oils are mainly vegetable based and sometimes animal based oils, which have been refined and modified to remove undesirable impurities to make them suitable for human consumption. These processes may include rendering, plant extraction, bleaching, deodorization, and hydrogenation to improve their functionality, taste, and storage stability. Edible oils are hydrogenated in the form of triglycerides to produce fully hydrogenated oils (FHO).  Due to health based trans fatty acid regulations, partially hydrogenated oils (PHO) have been or will be soon replaced by interesterified FHO for edible applications. Nonetheless, we still offer MONCAT™ 2021 to manufacture PHO for non-edible oleochemical uses.

FHO can be used for food preparation or for interesterification with unsaturated oils to create the desired melting point and texture, which makes them an important ingredient in functional foods (“trans fatty acid (TFA) free”) and oleochemicals.

Our MONCAT™ catalysts are supported reduced nickel catalysts embedded in hydrogenated vegetable oils. They are free of water, easy to handle and provide high yields of the desired products.

MONCAT™ 2021 is our main and preferred catalyst for FHO and PHO.

Chromatocel® aluminas and silica gels can be used to purify phospholipids, decolorize oils and adsorb FFA from certain edible oils and plant extracts. 

The larger particles from Dynocel® 600 allow for higher throughput and faster removal of unwanted impurities from oil products when alumina is the right fit for an adsorbent. 

Your benefits at a glance:

• Technical support for catalyst, alumina and silica gel use.
• Depending on the regulations of your location, we offer spent nickel catalyst disposal services that sustainably recycle nickel for the production of chemicals.