(652b) Corning® Advanced-Flow™ Photo Reactors: A Light Touch to Continuously Improve Chemical Synthesis

Over the past 20 years, Corning has delivered its disruptive continuous flow process intensification platform, Corning® Advanced-Flow™ Reactors and their application technologies to the chemical processing industry to enable “fast” lab-scale flow process development as well as seamless scale-up of flow processes to commercial production.

Transferring chemical synthesis from traditional batch technology to continuous flow technology brings significant advantages in the reduction of cost, and in the management of safety – two factors that are typically associated with process scale-up. In the pharmaceutical, fine and specialty chemicals industries, product quality requirements have become crucial parameters for manufacturers to consider. With traditional batch technology, it is often not possible to maintain optimum product quality when scaling up a process in a short period of time. However, with Corning’s continuous flow technology, seamless scale-up can be achieved via straight-forward methodology due to the consistent performance of Corning Advanced-Flow Reactors Technology, including 1000x improvement in heat transfer, 10-100x enhancements in multiphase mixing, 1000x reduction in chemical holdup compared to conventional stirred batch reactors.

Scaling up processes using Corning Advanced-Flow Reactors Technology can be faster than with traditional batch processing methods and time-to-market can be drastically reduced. In addition, this technology can help reduce development and production costs.

Recently, there is regained interest in the field of photochemistry that is driven by a need for synthetic alternative routes as well as new technological tools to perform photochemical reactions. Photochemistry can be a formidable tool to simplify multistep synthesis and can lead to increased cost-savings, improved carbon economy and enhanced selectivity and yield of a process.

Combining the advantages of Corning’s reactors with photochemistry gives users access to a wide variety of photochemical reactions and the ability to precisely control the process conditions and light input.

Available across all scales – from laboratory up to industrial throughputs, Corning Advanced-Flow Reactors offer a controlled and repeatable set of conditions to explore a wide range of photochemical reactions.

Additionally, the fundamentals of photochemistry will be presented. The impact of its combination with flow chemistry will be reviewed and used to show an alternative approach to optimizing reactions using photocatalysts in flow synthesis. Using applications, this different concept is shown to lead to a more cost-efficient competitive process.