Microreactor
Microreactors can offer many advantages over conventional scale reactors, including improvements in energy efficiency, reaction speed and yield, safety, reliability, scalability, on-site/on-demand production, and a much finer degree of process control.
[1] One of the first microreactors with embedded high performance heat exchangers were made in the early 1990s by the Central Experimentation Department (Hauptabteilung Versuchstechnik, HVT) of Forschungszentrum Karlsruhe[3] in Germany, using mechanical micromachining techniques that were a spinoff from the manufacture of separation nozzles for uranium enrichment.
[3] As research on nuclear technology was drastically reduced in Germany, microstructured heat exchangers were investigated for their application in handling highly exothermic and dangerous chemical reactions.
The benefits here are primarily enabled by the mass transfer, thermodynamics, and high surface area to volume ratio environment as well as engineering advantages in handling unstable intermediates.
[1] Following green chemistry principles, microreactors can be used to synthesize and purify extremely reactive Organometallic Compounds for ALD and CVD applications, with improved safety in operations and higher purity products.
[11][12] In microreactor studies a Knoevenagel condensation[13] was performed with the channel coated with a zeolite catalyst layer which also serves to remove water generated in the reaction.
[14] A Suzuki reaction was examined in another study[15] with a palladium catalyst confined in a polymer network of polyacrylamide and a triarylphosphine formed by interfacial polymerization: The combustion of propane was demonstrated to occur at temperatures as low as 300 °C in a microchannel setup filled up with an aluminum oxide lattice coated with a platinum / molybdenum catalyst:[16] Enzymes immobilized on solid supports are increasingly used for greener, more sustainable chemical transformation processes.
It is evident that similar microreactor based platforms can readily be extended to other enzyme-based systems, for example, high-throughput screening of new enzymes and to precision measurements of new processes where continuous flow mode is preferred.
Turnkey (ready to run) systems are being used where the application environment stands to benefit from new chemical synthesis schemes, enhanced investigational throughput of up to approximately 10 - 100 experiments per day (depends on reaction time) and reaction subsystem, and actual synthesis conduct at scales ranging from 10 milligrams per experiment to triple digit tons per year (continuous operation of a reactor battery).
Such development partners typically excel in the set-up of comprehensive investigation and supply schemes, to model a desired contacting pattern or spatial arrangement of matter.
