ThalesNano and University of Texas Developed Pioneering Undergraduate Hydrogenation Course Now Available to Schools Worldwide

June 2nd 2010: BUDAPEST, HUNGARY and PRINCETON, NJ and ARLINGTON, TX
ThalesNano and the O’Brien Group at the University of Texas at Arlington today announced the completion of their collaboration to develop a safe, scientifically interesting course to re-introduce hydrogenation to teaching labs worldwide.

The course is designed to be completed using ThalesNano’s H-Cube® and H-Cube Tutor® flow hydrogenation systems, which eliminate the dangers of handling hydrogen and pyrophoric catalysts — the main reasons that hydrogenation reactions are no longer a part of most undergraduate lab syllabuses.

Initially available in English and Mandarin Chinese, the course makes available both multimedia and traditional course materials to allow educators worldwide to introduce the principles of hydrogenation and then direct students to carry out several industrially commonplace hydrogenation and hydrogenolysis reactions as part of a regular lab class.

Professor Chris O’Brien of the University of Texas at Arlington commented: “At UTA, we have long hoped to teach the technique of hydrogenation in our undergraduate labs, but for safety reasons we have been unable to do this. Thanks to the H-Cube, postgraduate and undergraduate students have routinely been able to carry out hydrogenations for several years. Based on this multiyear experience, we were able to deliver a formal hydrogenation course that we believe can be easily adopted at other schools. It is exciting to see more H-Cubes being utilized in an educational context, and it is fair to say that graduates with practical experience of hydrogenation will have a head start when applying for jobs in industry.”

“ThalesNano have always recognized the importance of academia in helping to establish innovative technologies as new industry standards,” added Dr. Laszlo Urge, CEO of ThalesNano, Inc. “This initiative is expected to be of enormous interest to educators as the H-Cube® family of products will allow them not only to reintroduce hydrogenation to the teaching lab, but also to give their students practical experience of flow chemistry — currently the fastest growing trend in industrial synthetic chemistry.”

The course materials, including multimedia training videos, a presentation, and lab notebook, are free to download at the following site: http://www.thalesnano.com/services/hydrogenation-class.

About ThalesNano Inc.:
ThalesNano (www.thalesnano.com) is a world-leading provider of continuous process chemistry instruments in the rapidly developing market of laboratory and process scale flow reactors. The company has the widest portfolio of bench-top continuous process instruments. Its R&D 100 award winning H-Cube® continuous-flow hydrogenation reactor and the pilot plant scale version H-Cube Midi® are used in hundreds of laboratories in four continents and have become the new industry standard for hydrogenation.