A Microfluidic Device for Conducting Gas-Liquid-Solid Hydrogenation Reactions

Abstract

We have developed an efficient system for triphase reactions using a microchannel reactor. Using this system, we conducted hydrogenation reactions that proceeded smoothly to afford the desired products quantitatively within 2 minutes for a variety of substrates. The system could also be applied to deprotection reactions. We could achieve an effective interaction between hydrogen, substrates, and a palladium catalyst using extremely large interfacial areas and the short path required for molecular diffusion in the very narrow channel space. This concept could be extended to other multiphase reactions that use gas-phase reagents such as oxygen and carbon dioxide.

Novel synthesis of thick wall coatings of titania supported Bi poisoned Pd catalysts and application in selective hydrogenation of acetylene alcohols in capillary microreactors

“…27 This method was applied to obtain a 5-20 μm thick coating inside shorter (0.3 m) reactors 28 or a thin coating (90 nm) inside 10-m long reactors. 23,29 Another derivative of the dip-coating method, the fill-and-dry method, can be used to obtain [10][11][12][13][14][15][16][17][18][19][20] μm thick catalytic coatings inside short reactors. [30][31][32] However, the essential component of these methods, solvent evaporation, requires years to remove solvent from a longer (5 m) reactor according to estimations performed using Stefan's equation, 33 Fig.…”

Design, fabrication and characterization of microreactors for high temperature syntheses

“…In recent years, microfluidic systems have been increasingly used for synthetic purposes due to the advantages that they confer and the evolution that they have suffered from simple basic devices to more complex systems [10,[13][14]. These systems not only can be directly attached to pre-treatment steps or analytical instruments (such as chromatographs or spectrophotometers) but also can integrate some of them, even monolithically [15][16]. Some studies reveal that the high surface area to volume ratio of microreactors improves mass and heat transfer, giving nearly gradientless conditions, which are desirable for the determination of reaction kinetics [17][18].…”

Enzymatic microreactors in biocatalysis: history, features, and future perspectives

“…Moreover, the enhancement of mass and heat transfer optimize the reaction selectivity [18]. For these reasons, microreactors have proven to be successful in the production of new pharmaceutical compounds [19] or in complex organic synthesis, such as gas-liquidsolid hydrogenations of organic compounds [20]. Finally, studies about micromixing phenomena allow for an understanding of reagent mixing on a large scale [21][22][23].…”