Tuning of flow profiles in wall-less tube devices

Objective

"Flow reactors are vital in the modern chemical industry, and their importance is growing more and more as high-value sectors such as pharmaceuticals and fine chemicals shift toward processes with smaller ecological footprints. Flow systems are perfect candidates to replace batch processes since they offer significant advantages, including enhanced control over critical reaction parameters such as temperature, mixing, and residence time. This feature leads to improved yields, product quality, and production costs and even enables the possibility to perform chemical reactions that are difficult or impossible to carry out in batch mode. Despite their advantages, current flow reactors also face challenges. In laminar flow regimes, the parabolic velocity profile leads to broad residence time distributions (RTD), which reduce selectivity and yield. While turbulent flow can achieve near plug-flow behaviour with narrower RTD, its operation requires high operational costs, and its applicability is limited in case of slow reactions, which require long residence times. The project ""Tuning of flow profiles in wall-less tube devices (FlowTune)"" aims to tune flow profiles by further developing the host's advanced liquid tube technology. Our goal is to overcome the limitations set by the current technology and engineer a flow reactor in which the RTDs can be tailored arbitrarily, even in real time. Such a device can serve as a valuable improvement in the production of fine chemicals and allows even more processes to be transitioned to flow systems."