Costs microreactor technology

Dow Chemical in Midland, USA, the microprocess technologist Velocys in Plain City, USA, and PNNL in Richland, USA, as research institute in microreactor technology have a public funded project on high-intensity production of ethylene and other olefins by oxidation such as the formation of ethylene from ethane [1], A two-step reactor engineering is performed, starting with a bench-scale reactor with microchannel dimensions equal to the latter commercial unit and followed by numbering to the latter. An economic analysis with focus on reactor costs and energy consumption completes the project. 

List at least four cases of chemical manufacture that can benefit from microreactor technology. What are the pitfalls, and what technology developments are needed to drive the use of microreactors in industry Base your comments on conversion, activity/selectivity, and cost considerations. What would you do to enhance the throughput if you had to design a reactor and were told that mixing was detrimental ... 

However, for commercial production, the use of continuous microreactor technology should be justified by a dear cost advantage in comparison to presenfly applied technologies. The use of microfluidic bioreactors opens up possibilities for new production concepts, particularly continuous processing and flexible scale-up on demand via parallelization. There is, however, a need for a modular networks consisting of upstream steps (reaction) and downstream step (separation and purification), that is, the development of whole biocatalytic processes for real implementation in industrial setting. 

For successful implementation of micro- and millireactor systems for production processes, the proof of economic benefits is cmdal. Methods of life cycle assessment are currently under development and have been described for selected processes in the literature [22,23]. Of particular importance in the cost assessment are the labor costs that lead to requirements of successful implementation of microreactor technology also in terms of computerized operation enabled by advances in process control and automation concepts [24,25]. 

Microreactor and microprocess technology has, in some fine-chemical cases, approached commercial applications and become competitive with existing technology. Two main developments are awaited. Firstly, optimizing the process protocol conditions such that the chemistry is set to the limit of the reactor s capabilities in terms of mass and heat transfer. This so-called novel chemistry approach achieves the highest process intensification and can improve the costing of microprocess... 

Battelle Pacific Northwest National Laboratories (PNNL, Richland, WA) are developing microreactors that produce synthesis gas. These reactors can be mass-produced to yield efficient, compact and cost-effective systems, and they have been made from copper, aluminum, stainless steel, high-temperature alloys, plastics and ceramics. Conventional technologies cannot take full advantage of the intrinsically rapid surface reactions involved in the catalytic conversion of hydrocarbon fuels, but microreactors with integrated catalyst structures can61. 

Meanwhile, Merck has reported to have 20 microreactor plants under operation for diverse reactions [65]. The production costs are typically reduced by 20% as compared to prior conventional technology. The throughputs range from 50g/h to 4kg/h, which corresponds to 146kg/a and 11.7 t/a, respectively. 

Microfabrication technology used to manufacture microreactors also introduces many advantages, most notably the ability to rapidly and cheaply mass-produce devices. The low cost of microfabricated devices makes it possible for these devices to be disposable, a characteristic desirable for many medical applications. Rapid scale-up of production by operating many microreactors in parallel can also be accomplished. Microfabrication also presents the opportunity for complete systems in a single monolithic device or systems on a chip as microreactors are incorporated with chemical sensors and analysis devices, microseparation systems, microfluidic components, and/or microelectronics. 

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