Mikroen Technology successfully overcomes a sharp problem that typically affects chemical and pharmaceutical processes and reactions in continuous flow format: Low conversion rates of reactants into products.

Direct microwave irradiation of chemical processes in flow by the end of last century introduced elegance and simplicity to the design of flow reactors but brought little improvement to process rates; only small fractions of microwave power are converted into heat during the irradiation process, thus resulting in low efficiency of microwave energy transfer to the reaction medium. When considering the usually brief “residence time” (the time that the process/reaction mixture spends inside the flow reactor, ranging from several seconds to several minutes) and the limited number of microwave-absorbing organic solvents, the heat thus generated is insufficient to drive reactions to completion. Attempts to use powerful microwave instruments do not truly address this problem because such undertaking does not improve the efficiency of microwave-solvent interactions.

Mikroen Technology brings a state-of-the-art solution to this problem, implemented through changing the conceptual basis on which the previous microwave-assisted, continuous flow technology was founded. The necessary reaction heat is generated on the reactor module (instead of the body of process mixture) then transferred to the process ingredients in flow via the conductivity mechanism. Such an application inverts the heat generation and transfer dynamics for microwave assisted processes in flow and by doing so causes a tremendous acceleration of process kinetics.

This approach has been widely documented in several publications in respected chemistry & engineering journals, citing a considerable number of diverse syntheses in flow, in which the reaction times for continuous flow processes were significantly shortened to mere minutes versus several hours for conventional batch synthesis.

The same technological principle is applied to Ultra High Temperature (UHT) Flow Processing. The sphere of applications includes an extremely diverse number of processes ranging from liquid foods, pasteurization, and biotechnology related processes to chemical recycling of plastic waste through pyrolytic depolymerization. High process temperatures introduced remotely on the device allow for simplified engineering designs while enabling a fast tracked, low energy process mixture treatment.