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Online NMR spectroscopy is an excellent tool to study complex reacting multicomponent mixtures and gain process insight and understanding. For online studies under process conditions, flow NMR probes can be used in a wide range of temperature and pressure. This paper compiles the most important aspects towards quantitative process NMR spectroscopy in complex multicomponent mixtures and provides examples. After NMR spectroscopy is introduced as an online method and for technical samples without sample preparation in deuterated solvents, influences of the residence time distribution, pre-magnetization, and cell design are discussed. NMR acquisition and processing parameters as well as data preparation methods are presented and the most practical data analysis strategies are introduced.

Medium-resolution nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy (MR-NMR) currently develops to an important analytical tool for both quality control and process monitoring. In contrast to high-resolution online NMR (HR-NMR), MR-NMR can be operated under rough environmental conditions. A continuous re-circulating stream of reaction mixture from the reaction vessel to the NMR spectrometer enables a non-invasive, volume integrating online analysis of reactants and products. Here, we investigate the esterification of 2,2,2-trifluoroethanol with acetic acid to 2,2,2-trifluoroethyl acetate both by (1) H HR-NMR (500 MHz) and (1) H and (19) F MR-NMR (43 MHz) as a model system. The parallel online measurement is realised by splitting the flow, which allows the adjustment of quantitative and independent flow rates, both in the HR-NMR probe as well as in the MR-NMR probe, in addition to a fast bypass line back to the reactor. One of the fundamental acceptance criteria for online MR-MNR spectroscopy is a robust data treatment and evaluation strategy with the potential for automation. The MR-NMR spectra are treated by an automated baseline and phase correction using the minimum entropy method. The evaluation strategies comprise (i) direct integration, (ii) automated line fitting, (iii) indirect hard modelling (IHM) and (iv) partial least squares regression (PLS-R). To assess the potential of these evaluation strategies for MR-NMR, prediction results are compared with the line fitting data derived from the quantitative HR-NMR spectroscopy. Although, superior results are obtained from both IHM and PLS-R for (1) H MR-NMR, especially the latter demands for elaborate data pretreatment, whereas IHM models needed no previous alignment. Copyright © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

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