Case Study 1 Physical Characterization of the Set-up for an Enantioselective Synthesis

2 Case Study 1 [C1] Physical Characterization of the Set-up for an Enantioselective Synthesis 

Driven by the rapidly growing demand for highly enantiomeric pure substances in the pharmaceutical industry in order to provide safer and cheaper drugs, the development of a process which can achieve enantioselectivities approaching 100% has become desirable and challenging. 

One case study within the framework of this project is thus to test the concept of a micro structured reactor plant by applying the fast reaction of the enantioselective synthesis via organoboranes yielding chiral-substituted alcohols. This is typically a batch process carried out in the laboratory using conventional glassware and in the present case has been converted into a continuous process carried out by micro structured devices. This set-up has been used to characterize the physical properties of the backbone system. 

The gray boxes indicate the positions of the individual backbone elements the peaks in the right box are due to cables lying in front of the element. Temperatures are surface temperatures measured at the spacer bars with corrected material emissivities [86]. 

The temperatures reflect only the housing temperatures and not the fluid temperatures inside the pipes. It is nevertheless a strong hint that a thermal separation of different plant sections is possible. Here, the left heated section is separated from the colder right section, as the PTFE element (second element from the left) aollows the development of a sufficiently large temperature gradient of approximately 20 °C in this example. 

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