engleski

Continuous flow reactors -future trend in chemical process industry

Today demands for better control and monitoring of chemical processes as well as stable product quality represent a challenge for chemical productionfacilities. Simulation, optimisation and experimental verification of parameters such as the required pressure and temperature can be solved by Industry 4.0. Its simulation capabilities and real-time process monitoring will reduce the failures like waste products and low conversion during production. Batch production is not transferable from pilot to industrial scale easily (scale up). Batch reactors accumulate mass and energy which, on various scales, completely loses linearity and it is sometimes impossible to predict the behaviour of the process on a larger scale. The answer that can overcome the above-mentioned problems are the special types of tubular reactors for continuous production, called millireactors and microreactors. The advantage of these systems is a mass and energy balance with no accumulation. The field of chemistry and chemical engineering dealing with continuous flow reactors is called flow chemistry.Until now, the most significant challenge for the application of continuous flow reactorswas manufacturingthem. The conventional glass microreactors are brittle, the manufacturing technology is challenging and does not facilitatemanufacturing of internal baffles or static mixers. To overcome the disadvantages of conventional glass microreactors in this paper, we present a new approach through additive manufacturing (AM) to design continuous flow reactors with baffles. AM is a manufacturing process in which the product is made with material deposition, usually layer by layer. The principle ofadding material enables design of complex geometries, but also access to the inside of the product which enables the design of complex geometric structures, internal baffles or static mixers inside a continuous flow reactor. For this reason, but also because of fast manufacturing times, AM has great potential for flow chemistryapplications.This paper presents a case study of millireactors and microreactors produced by AM. The efficiency and conversion of sunflower oil with methanol and KOH as a base catalyst to FAME (fatty acid methyl esters) was investigated on already known reaction mechanism. The advantage of millireactors and microreactors with internal barriers is more effective mixing in the process by achieving turbulent flow which promotes diffusion and reduces the influence of conduction and convection. This makes it possible to convert the reactants (sunflower oil and methanol with the catalyst) into FAME + glycerol with greaterefficiency. Also, the kinetics and modelling of this process assumethat scale up will be achieved by adding new units with the same characteristics. On the other hand, scale up of the batch reactors using the same process conditions on the 10 L and 1000 L system loses its kinetics and conversion of reaction.Further improvement of the existing reactor prototype can be achieved by integrating various parts of the process, such as the synthesis and separation of products into an integrated system. This research can be easily transferred to a larger, pilot or industrial scale by adding or merging new millireactors or microreactors into a series (numbering-up). In the above, it is possible to incorporateintensive process monitoring by placing sensors (input and output) and simulate or predict the behaviour of the process through their data acquisition. The aforementioned continuous monitoring and improvement of the efficiency and utilisation of the reaction itself can be achieved through Industry 4.0. Until now, the unspecified advantage of such integrated systems is the rapid determination of kinetics and synthesis characteristics with small quantities of reactants, which contributes to the overall improvement in the research and development of new products.The research is currently being conducted through a cooperation of two faculties (FCET and FMENA), and research questions will be answered viatwodoctoraldissertations. The first dissertation is focused on synthesis process and research about utilisation of millireactors and microreactors manufactured with AM in the flow chemistry, while the second is focused on design principles for AM and continuous flow reactors is the case study for verification of principles. This research shall enablethe production of functional millireactors and microreactors with FDM and SLA AM processes in which the synthesis of FAME is conducted. In the future in this type of reactors synthesis of other chemical compounds will be possible, withsuch reactorsultimately beingproduced with AM on anindustrial scale.

low chemistry ; additive manufacturing ; microreactors

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