Chemical Engineering August 2016 - 43

level. Finding someone that could do
this at a cost level that wouldn't kill
the business case was even harder.
The manufacturing cost of an industrial
microreactor is influenced by
many factors. The dominant factors
are choice of construction material,
intrinsic cost level of the required
manufacturing technology and complexity
of the design. It's evident that
the selected construction material
should fulfil the need for corrosion or
solvent resistance, and provide satisfying
heat conductivity along with
mechanical
strength
to
withstand
process conditions. Metals and ceramics
seem to present better properties
and easier compatibility with a
plant environment in comparison to
glass and polymers. The choice of
construction material also impacts
the manufacturing process since it
limits the options; for example, it's
difficult to weld a ceramic.
In the universe of manufacturing
technologies, we predominantly
see microreactor channels being
shaped by removing material from
a large foil or plate. Sometimes this
process delivers multiple channels
in parallel (etching, punching) but
mostly the channel is made in a serial
operation, one-by-one (machining,
sandblasting). This leads to
high manufacturing cost and high
consumption of material per unit of
reactor volume, which is especially
important with expensive corrosionresistant
materials. After the channel
shaping, the assembly of the reactor
often requires stacking of such 2-D
plates and bonding them tightly together
(diffusion bonding, clamping)
to obtain the industrial microreactor.
The most influential factor will be
the complexity of the reactor design,
which is a direct consequence of the
numbering-up strategy.
Crossing the chasm
In the mid 2000s, it became obvious
that the technology readiness
level (TRL) was insufficient. Economic
feasibility could only be reached in
niches. The expression of the basic
principles into feasible industrial microreactors
required complementary
developments. The challenge was
big and the necessity to improve the
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AUGUST 2016
43
manufacturability would lead us to unfamiliar
terrain. Open innovation with
strategic cooperation between knowhow
providers, equipment suppliers
and industrial end-users was chosen
as the way forward.
We applied
the
principle of P.
Drucker - " If you can't measure it,
you can't improve it " - to direct our
efforts. We needed to benchmark
the solutions that equipment suppliers
offered amongst each other and
compare them to conventional stateof-the-art
technologies. This was a
classic example of trying to compare
apples
with
oranges.
Information
in publications was mostly useless
since the microreactor achievement
was compared with a suboptimal
conventional process.
We developed our own metrics
based on the ratio of the " volumetric
Precise
dosing with
multi-port
valve blocks
* Process
reliability
under stringent
requirements
* Precise control
and integration of
components in the
smallest of spaces
* Individual customer solutions
to specific requirements
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