Kinetic and Scale-Up Investigations of Epoxide Aminolysis in Microreactors at High Temperatures and Pressures

A continuous-flow microreactor is applied for a kinetic study of a model beta-amino alcohol formation by epoxide aminolysis. A large number of experiments are performed in a short time with minimal reagent consumption. The kinetics of formation of secondary aminolysis between starting epoxide and product are decoupled from the primary synthesis, constructing a complete model for desired product formation. The activation energy for the formation of desired product is observed to be higher than those for regioisomer formation and for secondary aminolysis, indicating that increasing temperature improves selectivity in addition to accelerating the reaction. A set of optimized conditions is then selected for best reaction performance, and the process is scaled up to a 100-fold larger reactor volume with model predictions in good agreement with measured process performance.