Structured Porous Millireactors for Liquid‐Liquid Chemical Reactions

Abstract

Milli‐scale reactors with an integrated microstructure offer a promising scale‐up approach for conventional microreactors. This study applies 3D‐printed structured porous millireactors to industrially relevant liquid‐liquid reactions. The underlying transport mechanisms are identified by quantifying interfacial heat and mass transfer. The structured reactors perform limited in Taylor flow compared to a packed‐bed reactor due to limited interfacial mass transfer. However, in stratified flow, their productivity increases significantly at a fraction of the pressure drop of a packed bed.

Scalability of 3D printed structured porous milli-scale reactors

“…Interestingly, both the Vito2_1.5D1F and the Insp1_1.5D1F reactor are manufactured by SLS technique and still demonstrated the aforementioned trend. This observation implies that the lower heat transfer performance of Vito2 reactors is also ascribed to their design parameters in addition to the inferior wall coupling associated with the 3DFD technique as previously observed by Potdar et al [4]. The oxidation of nonanol with bleach to produce nonanal is used to evaluate the scalability of the structured porous reactors in stratified flow.…”

“…Our previous study [4] has shown that the C-N cross coupling reaction between 2-chloro-anisole and ethyl-2-amino benzoate which was performed in biphasic conditions using a toluene-water system (Taylor flow) is a relatively slow reaction and thus requiring longer residence times (lower flow rates) where the influence of the highly porous structure on the flow is minimal. These low interstitial phase velocities resulted in limited slug breakage, and consequently lower interfacial mass transfer as well as reaction yield.…”

“…(3) The heat transfer measurements were performed in an experimental setup similar to the one described in Potdar et al [4]. One of the key changes was the replacement of the syringe pumps by HPLC pumps (LD Class, SSI) to account for the larger applied flow rates in the scaled-up reactors.…”

“…Consequently, structured porous reactors with variation in both stacking arrangement and orientation performed superior for both liquid-liquid systems. Moreover, the applicability of these milli-scale reactors to industrially relevant liquid-liquid chemical reactions was recognized [4]. However, to realize the desired production rate of e.g.…”

“…In addition, we discuss the scalability approach for structured porous reactors for two industrially relevant liquid-liquid chemical reactions, which are the C-N cross coupling reaction in Taylor flow, and the oxidation of primary alcohols in stratified flow. This scalability study is based on two structured reactors with an internal diameter of 3.4 mm; namely, Insp1 (manufactured by selective laser sintering (SLS) [21]) and Vito2 (manufactured by 3-Dimensional Fibre Deposition (3DFD) [22]) (nomenclature is based on our previous publications [3], [4]). These designs have been chosen due to their superior heat and mass transfer performance for liquid-liquid systems in both Taylor and stratified flow.…”