Use of Polymers as Disposable Construction Material

With the example of an HF plant, Ponton aimed at developing guidelines for inexpensive plant construction. The idea of using reactors of limited lifetime and made of disposable and recyclable materials, referred to as disposable batch plant [58, 60], was oriented on the highly sophisticated chemical manufacture of living organisms, animals and plants. Ideally, such systems would require no internal cleaning, repair or maintenance. 

As a cheap, recyclable construction material for micro reactors with sufficient short-term chemical resistance, polymers were explicitly mentioned. A further argument for the use of polymers is that for this material flexible computer-aided rapid prototyping methods are available in order to produce reactor components of complex shapes at moderate cost. The low thermal stability of polymers, however, demands advanced heating concepts when carrying out high-temperature reactions. 

For example, this may be accomplished by means of microwave heating, avoiding the generation of hot surfaces. 

In order to reduce the technical expenditure of processing, the use of pumps for the transport of process fluids should be avoided, and such transport should be simply based on peristalsis or gravity feed, hence eliminating moving parts. For product analysis, sophisticated non-invasive techniques are proposed. 

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