Modeling of microreactors for ethylene epoxidation and total oxidation

The industrial breakthrough of flow chemistry and catalyzed single phase microreactor technology is expected to take place first in the production of fine and specialty chemicals. For some bulk products (e.g EO), flow chemistry has already arisen interest. The benefits that microreactors can offer are the exact control of process conditions, the compact reactor size and the ease of scalability by simply “numbering up”. For a new product, ease of scalability shortens the time to market, whereas for a bulk product like EO, millireactors (structurally similar to microreactors, just having larger flow channels) may be more potential candidates for on-site production applications.