Zeolite membrane microreactor for fine chemical production

Fine chemicals, such as pharmaceuticals, are conventionally produced by large volume batch reactor, in which long residence time for reaction is required. Such chemicals are often highly specific upon customers and with short shelf life. The industrial batch reactors are normally with dimension that are of several magnitudes higher than the volume of the products required. Such size limitation of existing industrial scale reactor results in substantial amount of reactant input and introduces waste for considerable amount of reactant for producing much more than enough fine chemicals that within a narrow storage period. Microreactor provides an alternate way for fine chemical production in a continuous flow manner with less reactant required and without excess fine chemicals produced as waste. Microreactor has the advantages of high specific surface and high heat and mass transfer rate, which allows better control of the process and highly toxic or highly exothermic processes to be operated without safety hazard. For most fine chemical production, by-product in small molecule size is generally produced, incorporating membrane in the reactor system can remove the redundant by-product from the target product, remove the unfavourable thermodynamic constraints, achieving high conversion and high yield. In this research, hydrophilic zeolite membrane microreactor is incorporated with catalyst for the fine chemical manufacturing reaction is studied in micro multi-channels reactors. There is start for the industries to shift the operation from conventional batch process operation to microsystem process; yet with the overwhelming advantages of microreactor, the limitations of such operation are usually overlooked. The limitations of microreactor have been studied in this project