Fine Chemicals

Introduction

Historically fine chemicals have been used to describe manufacturing processes where the product output is measured in kilograms and the manufacturing reactor is a continuous stirred reactor (CSTR) followed by a batch purification stage such as a distillation column.

Typical products would be dyes, pharmaceutical actives, adhesives etc. The manufacturing processes are a scaled up version of laboratory process that developed the chemical. A CSTR consists of a stirred vessel that is heated in a controlled profile, stirred and after a fixed time cooled and discharged. They are widely used throughout the world wide process industries.

The benefits of a CSTR are the low capital cost and the potential flexibility to make more than one product. The disadvantages are the high energy usage/unit of product, variations in the degree of mixing and the fact that the reaction conditions vary throughout the batch tending to result in the creation of waste products.

Historically the challenge has been to measure the degree of mixing within the CSTR as it is often a two or three phase mixture.

Solution

Process tomography can provide information for process development, process diagnostics and process control over a range of unit processes:

mixing in a wide variety of processes, such as static mixers, jet mixing, batch mixing and blending
flow of multiphase systems, including phase inversion, flow characterisation
separation, such as filtration, liquid-liquid separation, chromatography and other packed columns
reactions, such as crystallisation, hydrogenation and polymerisation. In addition process tomography can provide information on homogeneous and heterogeneous catalysis