Microreactor tube heat exchanger

Stainless steel is the material of choice for process chemistry. Consequently, stainless steel microreactors have been developed that include complete reactor process plants and modular systems. Reactor configurations have been tailored from a set of micromixers, heat exchangers, and tube reactors. The dimensions of these reactor systems are generally larger than those of glass and silicon reactors. These meso-scale reactors are primarily of interest for pilot-plant and fine-chemical applications, but are rather large for synthetic laboratories interested in reaction screening. The commercially available CYTOS Lab system (CPC 2007), offers reactor sizes with an internal volume of 1.1 ml and 0.1 ml, and modular microreactor systems (internal reactor volumes 0.5 ml to... 

Conventional alternatives to a microreactor, such as non-catalytic tubular reactors, exhibit about 100-150 m m surface area to reactor volume, a value very similar to conventional heat exchangers. Using these reactors with porous catalysts filling the tubes can increase the surface area dramatically up to 10 nf m . Typically, the surface area of microreactors is in the range of lO to 10 nf m . This is the surface area only of the microreactor walls, which in general are non-porous. 

Desktop Chemical Factory, Fig. 5 United microreactor system. Example of a modular backbone 1 heat exchanger, 2 mixer, 3 valve, 4 safety valve, 5 pump, 6 heated residence time module, 7 mixer-settler extractor, 8 heated mixer tube reactor, 9 thermal decoupler [12]... 

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