these batch reactors are then made needlessly large , and are often fed with a large stoichiometric excess of gas at elevated pressures .
This not only leads to an inefficient use of equipment and resources , but also gives rise to dangerously high gas holdup in the reactor as well . This especially proves problematic for production with ever more stringent safety regulations or even restricts scale-up ambitions when dealing with toxic or highly reactive gasses .
Flowid has engineered and manufactured several pilot and production skids with multiple dynamic flow reactors per skid in series or parallel for gas-liquid reactions . These reactions are all either highly exothermic and / or impose safety or energy concerns in conventional production .
For some clients , this meant that they would otherwise have been unable to increase production capacity to meet increased market demands by scaling up conventional batch processes , as this would lead to safety end regulatory problems .
Table 1 shows three industrial cases of multi-phase processing in which a production skid from Flowid has been installed on an industrial scale to solve these problems . In the first , where gaseous HCl was used in the production of an aroma molecule , the advantages were :
• Major energy savings and reduction in CO 2 emissions
• Higher yield and product of higher purity
• Lower capex investment due to intrinsic safety After the transition from batch to a continuous gas-liquid production , the production process is significantly safer and more economic , and resulted in a more than 80 % reduction in energy requirements and CO 2 emissions . The conventional batch process was performed in a 10 m ³ stirred , glasslined batch reactor , entailing a nineday batch cycle with cooling at 0 ° C .
These long cycle times and the large amount of reactive volumes not only pose a significant safety risk , they also require a lot of energy
42 SPECIALITY CHEMICALS MAGAZINE ESTABLISHED 1981