This tutorial review describes how micro reactors are being applied to synthetic chemistry covering a wide range of applications, from the preparation of nanograms of material for drug discovery and screening to the multi-tonne production of fine chemicals. This article explores how miniaturisation may revolutionise chemical synthesis and demonstrates that products are generated in higher yield and purity compared to the equivalent bulk reactions, in much shorter periods of time.
At present, the aims of the investigations with microchemical
processing devices are changing from simply proving feasibility
for one chemical reaction towards more in-depth scientific
studies and industrial piloting. In this way, large data sets are
gathered, providing multifaceted information on the topic. To
enable industrial exploitation of the technology, future investigations should aim to complete the economic evaluation of
the methodology for plant engineering. Hence, commercially
oriented studies have to be undertaken, not with the aim to
further broaden the scope of information, but rather to achieve
a new system-oriented level of know-how. Since this involves
the interaction of many parties with many different skills, it is
a bridging function that is needed to bring the vast amount of
findings documented to a compact format and to compare it to
the state of the art in the chemicals-producing industry.
Accordingly, this contribution reviews many chemical reactions
carried out in either credit-card-sized microdevices or in larger
microflow processing tools for reasons of screening/analysis and
organic synthesis/industrial piloting, respectively. Quantities
which characterize the process itself, the product on a molecular
and supramolecular level, and the downstream processing are
compared for both microreactor and conventional processing,
benchmarking the performance of microflow devices at minute
and large throughput levels.
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