Millireactor in Production
Ehrfeld Mikrotechnik BTS designed, manufactured and supplied a MIPROWA production reactor for Shaoxing Eastlake Biochemical (China) for a production capacity of up to 10,000 t/a. The MIPROWA millireactor with a throughput of about 1m3/h has a nominal width of 400 mm and a length of 7 m and contains about 150 rectangular reaction channels with exchangeable static mixers.
Shaoxing Eastlake Biochemical successfully launched the production plant in Shaoxing mid-September. The continuously operated millireactor replaces more than 20 batch reactors. The fast and strong exothermic reaction is of alkoxylation type. Decision for Miprowa technology was driven by achievable product quality, significantly improved yield, safety aspects and a short return on investment. Eastlake serves the global market segment of agrochemicals based on their active ingredients production.
Scale up started from lab scale by a transition of channel geometries from micrometer to millimeter scale. By this proceeding similar conditions could be achieved in lab scale as later in the channels of the production reactor. Furthermore conclusions could be drawn about the performance parameters of the reactor in production scale. Additional validation experiments in pilot scale with same channel geometries as in production were needed for testing real raw material behavior. Compared to established process technologies a much faster scale-up process could be realized.
