engleski

The application of microreactors in biochemical engineering

Nowadays, microreactors are finding more and more applications in many fields, from chemical industry and biotechnology to pharmaceutical industry and medicine. They offer many fundamental and practical advantages comparing to classical macroreactors such as large surface to volume ratio, excellent mass and heat transfer, shorter retention time, smaller amount of reagents, catalysts and waste products, laminar flow, etc. Microreactors consist of a network of microsized channels etched into solid substrate while typical dimensions of microchannels are in the range from 10 µm to 500 µm. They are connected to a series of reservoirs for chemical reagents and products to form a complete device called “chip”. Using microreactors, the complex scale-up procedure is replaced with numbering-up (replication of microreactor units), eliminating time and costs necessary for technology transfer from laboratory to industrial production. One of the biggest advantage of numbering-up is that continuous operation is uninterrupted if one of the units fails, because it can be easily replaced with no effect on other parallel units. Microreactors could be easily coupled with numerous detection techniques together with the pretreatment of the samples on the one single unit. Having in mind all those benefits one of the main motivations for the use of microreactor technology is the gain in the yield and safety. The environmentally friendly and efficient development of products and processes is crucial for a sustainable development. An ecological and economic evaluation from the very beginning of the product/process design is therefore matter of prime importance. Evaluation procedure has to deal with a lack of knowledge in the early stages of product/process design and have to deliver sound results in the relatively short time period. It is possible to overcome that contradiction by using chemical engineering methodology that include modeling, simulation and optimization of processes and process parameters. Modeling, simulation and optimization in combination with experiments performed in microreactors enable to take maximal advantage of the experimental data at disposition. Microreactor advantages and chemical engineering methodology will be demonstrated on selected biotransformation and bioseparation processes, namely, alcohol dehydrogenase catalyzed hexanal production, NAD+ cofactor regeneration catalyzed by enzyme, laccase catalyzed L-DOPA and catechol oxidations and two-phase aqueous extraction of polyphenols.

microreactors; biochemical engineering

Ovaj se tekst temelji na radu koji je financirala Hrvatska zaklada za znanost.