Equipment and facilities

Micro structured reactors are used, among others, to perform reactions under reaction conditions that are thermally difficult to control in conventional macroscopic chemical reactors. This, in particular, applies to heterogeneously catalyzed gas reactions with high reaction enthalpies or gas reactions in reactant mixtures within the explosion region. The application of micro reaction engineering allows for improvement of material efficiency. This entails enhanced selectivity and yield as well as a significant change of safety characteristics, leading to suppression of explosion propagation. The small hold-up of chemicals makes micro structured devices less risky since it reduces the consequences of a failure. Instead of storing large amounts of unwanted dangerous intermediate products, the favoured final products are processed directly in a sequence of reactors. It is possible to operate micro reactors within the explosion region (in this case explosion region means the concentrations that enable explosions to propagate in macroscopic devices) because explosion propagation can be suppressed by microscopic inner dimensions. Up to now, there are no standard test procedures for the determination of safe operation conditions for micro reactors. Thus, it is an unresolved question, what investigation and test methods should be applied to micro reaction engineering devices, how to determine appropriate safety characteristics and how to use such parameter values in order to assess the safety of micro reactors.

The BAM Federal Institute for Materials Research and Testing has developed appropriate test methods and investigates micro reactors with respect to applicability and safety at specific process conditions. In the framework of a DFG-funded project a micro reactor has been developed and its advantages concerning safety have been investigated in cooperation with Prof. Klemm, Institute of Chemical Technology, University of Stuttgart.

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