Benchmarking of microreactor applications

At present, the aims of the investigations with microchemical processing devices are changing from simply proving feasibility for one chemical reaction towards more in-depth scientific studies and industrial piloting. In this way, large data sets are gathered, providing multifaceted information on the topic. To enable industrial exploitation of the technology, future investigations should aim to complete the economic evaluation of the methodology for plant engineering. Hence, commercially oriented studies have to be undertaken, not with the aim to further broaden the scope of information, but rather to achieve a new system-oriented level of know-how. Since this involves the interaction of many parties with many different skills, it is a bridging function that is needed to bring the vast amount of findings documented to a compact format and to compare it to the state of the art in the chemicals-producing industry. Accordingly, this contribution reviews many chemical reactions carried out in either credit-card-sized microdevices or in larger microflow processing tools for reasons of screening/analysis and organic synthesis/industrial piloting, respectively. Quantities which characterize the process itself, the product on a molecular and supramolecular level, and the downstream processing are compared for both microreactor and conventional processing, benchmarking the performance of microflow devices at minute and large throughput levels.