Yes, We Can!
Handling your sensitive chemistry
A common concern in the chemical industry is the testing of chemistries with moisture and oxygen sensitive catalysts. Doing so in a reliable, reproducible and safe manner can prove prohibitive to many R&D facilities. If there was a way to even run those chemistries in a high throughput experimentation mode, perhaps those processes can be improved faster than ever before.
Drying-out a large testing set-up can take a long time and is often unsuccessful due to moisture pockets, etcetera. Small and compact testing equipment offers a significant advantage over larger set-ups with bigger volumes of tubing and reactors, due to the reduced efforts to apply an inert atmosphere from the sample preparation to the final start of the test run.
Furthermore, an easy to use reactor loading which allows a catalyst exchange in seconds can significantly reduce the risk of contamination with traces of moisture or oxygen during the loading. But, this is only one part of the total workflow. Taking other factors like the amount of chemicals used and the accuracy of control into account then our Flowrence Technology based systems have an intrinsic advantage of handling those kinds of chemistries over more conventional high throughput systems.
Tailoring such systems for short term projects in your own research facilities can be a cumbersome procedure as additional infrastructure within the laboratory might need to be installed and the scientists and operators need a more dedicated training to run those mostly short term projects.
Within Avantium we are faced with those challenges on a regular base and have, therefore, made multipurpose laboratories available for such tests. But perhaps even more important, we have the right experts to handle those chemistries from the feed preparation down to the analytical results.
As an example you can see in the pictures above two tailored solutions we developed for a customer to execute a high margin hydrocarbon conversion chemistry with moisture in the low ppm level in the hydrocarbon feed in a high throughput way for the first time. This required new ways of thinking for feed and reactor handling under inert conditions and the transfer into the unit.
In this short video one of our operators demonstrates how we load air sensitive catalysts into the Flowrence Technology unit. This is achieved thanks to an inert atmosphere specialized glovebox that we adapted to our in-house Flowrence Technology units. Even with this setup, loading the reactors is still only a matter of seconds.
Using the application knowledge of our experts and utilizing the flexibility of the Flowrence technology allows us to deliver our outstanding accuracy to our customers in the most cost effective way for those challenging chemistries.