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Background
In the chemical industry new chemical or pharmaceutical development is a time consuming, expensive and labor intensive process. Especially the optimisation and scaling up of chemical reactions is inefficient in terms of processing time and consumption of precious chemical compounds. This results in a high environmental load and a long time-to-market. Hence, the chemical industry increasingly demands faster process development and more efficient production methods.
In general the development of new chemicals is performed by traditional batch processing which fully relies on versatile and qualified equipment to perform different unit operations. Scaling up these unit operations requires chemical engineering calculations as well as experimental results gained during lab-scale prototyping. The process of scaling up involves multiple steps through which the production volume is increased in every step. During this process the translation from a laboratory to production environment is difficult in particular. Continuous flow microreactor technology is currently emerging as a new way of conducting chemical process steps with numerous benefits over conventional batch technology.
Flow Chemistry Microreactor
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The use of microreactor technology can speed up the development and up-scaling by a more efficient way. Microreactors are devices operating with a continuous flow that allow strict control of reaction parameters to control reactions which are otherwise to reactive, exothermic or to hazardous for conventional use. Their interior is divided into small compartments with large surface-to-volume ratio. In order to get significant amounts of product, the microreactors are not scaled up but the internal volumes of the actual channels are increased by smart mechanical design, and the reactors are numbered up by parallelization (numbered-up).
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Single Microreactor
Internal volume:
100 nL - 100 µL
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Exploded view
multi-layer microreactor
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Multi-layer microreactor
Internal volume:
8 - 100mL
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These benefits keep on convincing both researchers in academia and industry to introduce microreactor technology into their own laboratory. FutureChemistry has developed and designed the essential hardware and software around microreactors, and offer complete systems in order to benefit from the great potentials of this new technology.
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