The problems of extracting products efficiently from
reaction workups
are often overlooked. Issues such as emulsions and rag layer formation
can cause long separation times and slow production, thus resulting
in manufacturing inefficiencies. To better understand science within
this area and to support process development, an image processing
methodology has been developed that can automatically track the interface
between liquid–liquid phases and provide a quantitative measure
of the separation rate of two immiscible liquids. The algorithm is
automated and has been successfully applied to 29 cases. Its robustness
has been demonstrated with a variety of different liquid mixtures
that exhibit a wide range of separation behaviormaking such
an algorithm suited to high-throughput experimentation. The information
gathered from applying the algorithm shows how issues resulting from
poor separations can be detected early in process development.
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