(130f) Siprocess - a Micro Process System for Process Development and Production

The batch-to-continuous-approach and its subset micro process technology are technologies with great potential for the syntheses of fine chemicals and active pharmaceutical ingredients. Micro process technology provides the chemist new possibilities in mixing and heat-transfer, which have already brought to use in lab-scale for many examples. Still, process development for continuous processes - with or without micro structured components - has been considered to be complex in set-up and use. Therefore, the absolute number of continuous processes in fine chemical and pharmaceutical industries is limited and only few production plants use micro process technology today. The micro process system SIPROCESS successfully meets this challenge. Siemens designed SIPROCESS for chemical syntheses in process development laboratories and for the production of initial quantities of a definite substance. The benefit in using SIPROCESS is a remarkable reduction of process development time. This results from continuous processing in an automated system and a very fast set-up of the modular system within less than one day. To determine kinetic parameters a typical experimental setup could have three sample positions along the flow path. At each position up to 14 analytical samples can be taken. This allows 42 samples obtained at different reaction conditions within only 3.5 h (s. fig. 1.) In the last years several industrial relevant chemical reactions of different classes were successfully performed in SIPROCESS, e.g. metal organic chemistry like Grignard additions or lithiations (avoidance of low temperature and contraction of life time of instable intermediates), nitration (reduced hold-up and efficient heat exchange), polymerisations (reproducible and narrow polymer size distribution). In general higher yields and/or space-time-yields were observed. In some cases product properties resulted that could never be achievable in stirred vessels in batch mode. Examples will be discussed in the presentation.