The role of the phase-transfer catalyst is to bring reactants together into the same phase that are initially in different phases with the purpose of achieving much more rapid reaction. As a result, many PTC systems require relatively little agitation beyond a certain minimum that promotes disturbing the interface enough to allow the phase-transfer catalyst to do the heavy lifting of one of the reactants across the phase boundary.
However, some PTC systems are “transfer rate limited” (“T-Reactions”) and continue to be sensitive to agitation efficiency, even when mixing is excellent. In those cases, the combination of phase-transfer catalysis with supercharged agitation provides the highest reactivity. In fact, if one can optimize the combination of PTC and agitation to achieve VERY fast reactions, one can achieve very high throughput continuous processes.
At the ACS Meeting in Philadelphia last month, a poster was presented by a collaboration between KinetiChem Inc., ProTeaf Technologies and Western Kentucky University that described a high throughput process for a PTC oxidation that appears to have a contact time of “0.03 seconds in the reaction zone.”
The reactor was KinetiChem’s Synthetron (TM) film-shear reactor. The catalyst was a mixture of tetrabutylammonium bromide and TEMPO. The oxidizing agent was pH-adjusted bleach. Conversion of 99.1% was achieved with an extremely short residence time.
If your company can benefit from achieving higher process performance in a shorter development time by having access to the best PTC expertise available, now contact Marc Halpern by E-mail to inquire about using phase-transfer catalysis to achieve low-cost high-performance green chemistry.
If you’re not sure if PTC can help your reaction, now fill out the form shown at http://phasetransfer.com/projectform.pdf and send it to Marc Halpern by fax at +1 856-222-1124 or by E-mail of a scanned copy. If we do not have a secrecy agreement already in place, please use “R-groups” instead of the exact chemical structures.
