Efficient Processing with Advanced Flow Reactor Technology

Dr. Pierre Woehl

Today, the commercial production of chemicals and drugs is mostly accomplished by batch processing in stirred tanks. Although it is easy to understand how laboratory scientists who developed their chemistries in flasks enabled the "batch mindset" that today permeates manufacturing, continuously streaming reactants together in narrow channels with a high degree of fluidic and thermal control can enable many reactions to be run far more efficiently, achieve higher end-product purity, and is in-line with the needs of Green Industrial Engineering. The efficiencies come from less material and energy used for the reactions, and in some cases elimination of purification steps.

We describe a highly-engineered glass flow reactor technology that makes process intensification a reality, and in addition provides a platform for taking challenging chemistries that have never been considered industrially practical from the lab to the manufacturing floor with virtually no scale-up risks.