Technology Overview
Taiwan's existing chemical industry mostly uses the technology of traditional batch production. In addition to the inability to produce accurately, it also has problems such as energy consumption, safety and environmental protection. Microreactor technology (MRT) has the advantages of precise control of temperature and pressure and flexible production, thereby accelerating chemical reactions, improving production quality and efficiency, and reducing by-products and production costs. Pollution is conducive to the mass production of small molecule drugs. MRT can enable the breakthrough in chemical and pharmaceutical technology innovation in Taiwan.
The technology applies the principle of computational fluid dynamics and performs microreactor channel calculation in order to design a novel micro-channel mixer. After design verification, ITRI has specialized in processing and using acid and alkali resistant titanium materials to produce three different test and verification machines, including laboratory microreactor modules, small pilot plant scale reactor modules and application MRT produced cream automatic commercial model.
Applications & Benefits
The use of this technology and ITRI’s self-developed machine has completed preliminary tests, which can be applied to the synthesis of pharmaceutical intermediates, and has achieved benefits such as shortening reaction time, increasing reaction selectivity, and reducing by-products. Among them, Tadalafil can shorten the reaction time by 5~60 times, the incidence of side reactions is less than 1/3 of the patented technology. The yield of p-toluenesulfonamide (PTSA) is 97.5%, which is about 10~15% higher than the yield of traditional batch production. These micro-reactor mixer hardware applications have been patented to Taiwan and the United States.
Application of MRT technology to produce automatic commercial cream model.
Microreactor module, (a), (b) laboratory microreactor module, (c) small pilot plant scale reactor module.