Thermal and mechanical analysis of a microreactor for high temperature catalytic gas phase reactions

Design and characterization of a microreactor for monodisperse catalytic droplet generation at both elevated temperatures and pressures

“…These platinum heaters are stable up to at least 500 ° [10], [11], depending on the adhesion layer used. These thin film microheaters have been widely reported in the literature [10]- [21], and vary from use in biological assays [15]- [17], [19], [20], to reactors or hotplates for single phase purposes [11]- [13], [18], and finally to reactions inside droplets on a microfluidic chip [16], [22]. In these last two cases, this was either achieved in stationary droplets [16], or using bulky heating systems [22].…”

“…Other work on microreactors either did not involve droplets [11]- [13], [18], or if it did, they were in bulky systems [22], and involved stationary droplets [16]. Our single catalyst particle diagnostic platform is designed to measure the activity of FCC particles and offers a well-controlled reaction environment with respect to both volume and temperature; all features integrated into a single microfluidic chip, and without bulky control systems.…”

Low-power silicon-based thermal sensors and actuators for chemical applications

“…The development of a good model for thermo-chemical actuation and possible heat loss mechanisms is crucial for the design of various catalytic microsystems, e.g. microcalorimetric sensors [62], [63], microfluidic calorimeters [64] and catalytic microreactors [65], [66]. Such a model allows to reduce the amount of labbench experiments and to predict device performance with respect to a specific application.…”

“…There is no drastic change in conduction loss mechanisms observed due to a comparable low thermal conductivity of the selected membrane materials. If the membrane would consist of silicon additionally to isolating layer as in microreactor system for catalytic partial oxidation [65], [66] then much higher heat fluxes would be allowed to flow to the silicon substrate and silicon-based membrane making heat flux towards the ambient negligible. In such a microreactor system, high supplied powers are necessary to compensate for the loss of heat through the membrane, as demonstrated the power raises almost up to 1W [65].…”

“…Also, high-throughput, sensitive thermal analysis of bio-chemical interactions is an important application, and was achieved using microfluidic calorimeters as demonstrated by W.Lee and co-workers [35]. In microreactors used for production or analysis of (bio-)chemical compounds [115], [116], and in heterogeneous catalysis research [117] good control over the temperature is necessary because of the exponential dependence of reaction rates. For many of the commonly used resistive materials, e.g.…”