Flow chemistry is big news at the moment, but one of the issues from a scale up perspective has been carrying out some of the process hazard analysis, and in particular reaction calorimetry. If reactants are unstable either thermally or chemically is it possible to get meaningful results from a conventional reaction calorimeter? A recent paper from OPRD1 has overcome that drawback by using a microreactor inside a reaction chamber, giving true heat flow measurements with data that is accurate to within 10 mW. The system consists of a commercially available batch reactor with glass microreactor optionally connected to a tubular microreactor, giving an overall reactor volume of up to ~5.5 ml.
- G. Glotz, D.J. Knoechel, P. Podmore, H. Gruber-Woelfler, and C.O. Kappe, Org. Proc. Res. Dev., 2017, 21, .763-770.
