The
esterification reaction is one of the most important reaction
in organic chemistry, and the development of scalable continuous flow
conditions is of high interest. Here we describe a scaling-up study
of benzoic acid alkylation by MeI in the presence of superbases from
a capillary reactor (282 mg·h–1 at 75 °C)
to a low flow reactor (LFR, 6.82 g·h–1 at 80
°C). First, the optimization of the base demonstrated that 1,8-diazabicyclo[5.4.0]-undec-7-ene
(DBU) was a good compromise in terms of basicity and price. A comparison
between batch and LFR reaction showed similar kinetic rates. We also
observed a maximum reactivity for a flow rate of 3 mL·min–1 which corresponds to an optimum mixing of the entering
fluids. A colorimetric study permits to show a visual change in the
flow regime (dispersed to stratified) by varying the flow rate with
a maximum conversion obtained at 3 mL·min–1 corresponding to a 105 s residence time, demonstrating that the
studied reaction is sensitive to mixing conditions and that LFR presents
some mixing limitations for low flow rates. After thermal optimization
(80 °C), the reaction has been improved to a productivity of
6.82 g/h at the lab scale using DBU as the base and Eyring/Arrhenius
plots permitted to extract activation energies.
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