(209a) Flow Reactors for Chemical Synthesis: An Opportunity for Process Control

The miniaturisation of chemical reactors offers many fundamental and practical advantages of relevance to the chemical industry, who are constantly searching for controllable, information rich, high throughput, environmentally friendly methods of producing products with a high degree of chemical selectivity.

In this presentation a number of chemical reactions of industrial interest will be used to illustrate the advantages that flow reactors offer for the rapid optimisation of reactions, in which the product is typically produced in both higher yield and purity. However with regard to the optimisation process the slowest step remains the analysis of the reaction mixtures using traditional laboratory techniques such as gas chromatography (GC) and high performance liquid chromatography (HPLC). This presentation will explore the need for on-line, real time measurement techniques to enable reactions to be optimised more rapidly. Furthermore, the integration of the system with real-time analytical detection will enable in situ process control to be achieved.