(23a) The Impact of Microtechnologies in Chemical and Pharmaceutical Production Processes

Confronted to high economical stakes in a very high competitive environment, the chemical and pharmaceutical industries are looking for innovative solutions: the challenge is not only to provide service to our consumer society, but to do so with markedly lower reliance on materials, energy, labour and waste. If technology was in the past viewed as a cause of environmental degradation, it is now recognized for its key contribution to sustainability by decoupling economic growth from environmental impact. Through the application of ?green' chemistry and engineering, the industry has already implemented innovations in the field of renewable resources, eco-efficient products, energy efficiency, waste reduction and reuse, inherently safer processes [1]. New R&D areas, such as ?white' biotechnologies, catalytic processes, ?green' solvents, alternative energies, can make a significant contribution to improved sustainability. A key topic is Process intensification (PI), where the motivation is ?doing more with less? [2,3]. First designed as a strategy to reduce the size of plants, PI takes a broader dimension as a method to give full potential to physico-chemical transformation by minimizing diffusional limitations. It is about adapting the equipment rather than the physico-chemical transformation to existing and often unsuited apparatus. In this context, microtechnologies show wide possibilities to replace large, expensive, inefficient equipment by smaller, more compact, safer, better controlled (therefore more economic) installations. They also allow creating new reaction conditions leading to development of new molecules. In R&D, microtechnologies have shown their value in high-throughput screening [4,5] by notably reducing the analysis cost through lower volumes used and faster analysis [6]. The current trend is now to transfer such innovation into production. Through flow process, the reaction conditions created in R&D could thus be applied directly for production purpose. We will thus discuss how microtechnologies could impact the chemical processing [7-10]. The advantages will be presented for each market segment targeted [10]. We will analyse the balance between technological advantages and technological hurdles for their implementation in chemical processing. Learning from some preliminary attempts to introduce the technology into processing, we will try to highlight the main challenges to overcome today to succeed. After this technological overview, we will present an economical analysis to highlight what could be the benefits over the investment. As an archetypical example, a 'novel-chemistry' process, tailored by IMM for microreaction engineering, will be benchmarked to its conventional counterpart. A cost analysis will be given for the high-pressure and high-temperature variant (?high-p,T', [11]) of the Michael addition [12] and Kolbe-Schmitt [13] synthesis, where an enormous increase in productivity is observed which dramatically change, e.g. in the space-time yields. It will be shown how this impacts the operational costs (OPEX) on one side, the investment costs (CAPEX) on the other side. Based on our analysis, we will conclude on the expected evolution of this field from a technological, economical and industrial point of view.

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