Development of Microstructured Reactors to Enable Organic Synthesis Rather than Subduing Chemistry

Micro-reaction technology is entering more and more into chemical process engineering and chemistry, complementing existing technologies. The benefits of microstructured reactors such as enhanced mass and heat transfer, defined residence time setting, and known, highly regular flow profiles give process intensification following standard chemical protocols. These unique features, however, can achieve more, namely to enable process chemistry with novel features. This includes handling of instable intermediates, safe processing in the explosive regime, setting reaction temperature at unusually high level, and more. In this way, the engineering benefits change the chemistry; thus, it has been termed novel chemistry here. While this has been done in a heuristic manner in the past, first deductive approaches were recently developed based on diffusion-reaction calculations and potential energy profiles which provide a mechanistic understanding what the new tool can do. In this context, many examples for organic reactions in microstructured reactors are described to underline the possible means of novel chemistry by using microstructured reactors.