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HERACLITUS

PANTA RHEI: EVERYTHING FLOWS… IN MICROREACTORS AND IN BEATING HEARTS

 

A macroscopic artist impression of the hydrodynamics in microreactors.

Tailor-made microreactors, 3D printed with high resolution printheads.

Continuous flow process development on demand.

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Flow chemistry, in its most basic sense, is defined as performing a chemical transformation in a continuous manner by pumping the reagents through a microreactor. In recent decades, flow chemistry gained a lot of interest both in academia and industry. Its increasing popularity is due to a lot of advantages over classical flask chemistry, such as safety aspects. Especially regarding the scalability of photo- and electrochemical reactions, flow chemistry offers numerous advantages.


Microreactors are used in the pharmaceutical industry in the drug discovery process, but also for the synthesis of nanoparticles, polymers and bio-substances in the fields of medicine and life sciences. Since the channels in microreactors have dimensions below 1 mm, 3D inkjet printing provides us with a high resolution printing technique that enables us to design and produce microreactors in a very flexible way. In the cabinet we show some samples that were designed and 3D printed by ChemStream with self-developed inks.​

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Detail of a 3D printed microreactor 

Experimental setup of a flow reactor in which the chemical reaction is triggered by UV-light​

Some of flow chemistry and microreactor technology’s main advantages are:

  • Increased mixing efficiency

  • Enhanced temperature control (better heating/cooling)

  • Shorter reaction times (improved kinetics)

  • Easy access to high pressures

  • Possibility of performing ‘forbidden’ chemistry by in situ generation

  • Controlled scaling factors (simple to scale up)

  • More efficient biphasic reaction (such as gas-liquid ones)

  • Enhanced safety ratings

 

ChemStream has the expertise in house to develop continuous flow syntheses for its customers, from scratch or for the scaling up of existing non-continuous processes.

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More about this subject can be found here

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