Intensifying Multiphase Reactions and Reactors: Strategies and Examples

Abstract

Intensification is intrinsic to better chemical and process engineering and has always been used in practice. Multiphase reactions and reactors are ubiquitous in chemical and allied industries and are of great economic and ecological importance. There is a great scope for intensifying multiphase reactions and reactors for realizing productivity enhancements, which are crucial for sustainable manufacturing. These enhancements can be in terms of increased throughput; better yield, conversion, and selectivity; smaller environmental footprint; and intrinsically safer operations. The advances in intensified reactors especially micro-reactors and microfluidic devices have created significant awareness about intensification in recent decades. In this note, we discuss different strategies for intensifying multiphase reactions and reactors based on the published information. Variety of tools and examples are presented to showcase the potential of intensification. We have found the efforts towards intensification of multiphase reactions and reactors very rewarding academically as well as professionally. We hope that this note will further stimulate interest in this area and pave the way towards realizing next generation productivity for chemical and allied industries.

Catalytic Transformation of Biomass Derivatives to Value‐Added Chemicals and Fuels in Continuous Flow Microreactors

“…[40,[108][109][110][111] In this respect, continuous flow processing is essential. [115] Above that, steady state processing in flow allows a fine product tuning and can decrease deviations in the product properties and composition.…”

“…[114] Many newly developed process intensification methods (e. g., reactive distillation, centrifugal reactors, microreactors, reactors assisted by ultrasonic or microwave irradiation) are rarely used in the industry to this date or at least is not a common practice yet. [115]…”

Process intensification for O2‐dependent enzymatic transformations in continuous single‐phase pressurized flow

“…Various engineering strategies have been devised for process intensification in O 2 ‐dependent biocatalysis (Gemoets et al, ; Karande et al, ; Mallia & Baxendale, ; Utikar & Ranade, ). The k L a was common target in an overall approach aimed at OTR optimization.…”

“…Microreaction technology offers different ways of gas–liquid contacting with high efficiency (Karande et al, ; Kashid, Renken, & Kiwi‐Minsker, ; Stone, Hilliard, He, & Wang, ; Utikar & Ranade, ; Yue, ). The specific surface area ( a ), the mass transfer coefficient ( k L ) or both are enhanced in consequence of the reactor's internal microstructure and the resulting fluidics of the two‐phase flow (Brzozowski, O'Brien, Ley, & Polyzos, ; Dencic, Hessel, et al, ; Dencic, Meuldijk, et al, ; Utikar & Ranade, ). k L a values of up to 30 min −1 were reported for segmented gas–liquid flow in microchannels (Kashid et al, ).…”

Manufactured chemistry: Rethinking unit operation design in the age of additive manufacturing

“…Van Gerven and Stankiewicz give a detailed review of the history of process intensification and a perspective on the ongoing practical challenges in process intensification recently graced these pages . Additionally, researchers have worked to develop computational process intensification design tools for process design and for the intensification of multiphase reactions and reactors …”