Whenever a new or modified process needs to be taken from lab to plant, the different aspects that may be critical or affect the performance or outcome of the process need to be investigated. In a few cases, the route chosen is also not scalable because of expensive or scarce starting materials, conditions that are difficult to control in large vessels, or potential safety hazards and thus, needs to be modified.
This requires the investigation of scale-dependent variables, such as dosing rates, mixing, or mass transfer. However, one of the key pieces of information to move a process into manufacturing safely is the understanding of the total heat released, the heat release rate, the accumulation of reactant(s) or energy as well as the stability of the reaction mass and the individual components.
Reaction calorimetry studies provide evidence of the critical process parameters and their impact on the process, the manufacturability, the yield, and the quality of the product or intermediate.
Since chemical reactions are influenced by several parameters such as concentration, addition rate, temperature, solvent, catalyst and pH value, the seamless integration of online analytics or automated sampling tools into the reaction calorimeter increases the value of the study tremendously.
Data-rich experiments comprising both calorimetry and analytical information effectively support today's needs for developing safe and robust processes fast and transferring them from lab to plant effectively.