DESIGN AND SCALE-UP OF CONTINUOUS FLOW MICRO-REACTOR

Abstract

Micro-reactor systems are a promising progress in chemical engineering. The challenge is to design continuous processes enable to develop products with uniform quality and high quantity,it might be provided by using the microreactors, the industrially important production of fine chemicals is frequently characterized by low conversions and yields, while the reaction conversion using the microreactors approaches +99%, which reduces the load in the separation step. The small volume of the micro-reactor issaving the material of construction, it isalso, enhanced the mass and heat management. Microreactors were locally designed and fabricated to develop a comprehensive study of micro-reactors performance. The aim of this article is the increasing of micro-reactor productivity through a numbering-up of the number of channels and micro-reactors. Multi-channel micro-reactors consist of ten and twenty Yshaped channels areemployed. Esterification reaction of ethanol/2-ethyl hexanoic acid was taken as an example to test the developed micro-reactors, itcarried out using different designs of micro-reactors.The reactions were completed at temperature 25°C and molar ratio 1:1. The product flow rate is significantly increased (0.00028-2.5E-6 m3s-1 ). A battery of 3-parallel microreactors of twenty channels was used to produce Ethyl Hexanoate, an economic feasibility study is developed.

Keywords

• Feasibility
• Fine chemical
• Micro-reactor
• Multi channels
• Scaling-up