Microreactors have been a hot-topic for chemical reactions in the past years. However, research and applications up to now has mostly focused on single phase reactions with stoichiometric reactions rather than catalytic reactions. This presentation will give a brief background on why microreactors are also highly attractive for multiphase applications and present some of the research topics that we are working on in our group related to this topic.

Firstly, the scale-up of multiphase microreactors will be discussed. Even though scale up of microreactors is often presented as being simple, as one can number up rather than scale up the reactor, this is not as simple for a multiphase system, due to the complexity of multiphase flow. We will present a solution that we have developed, namely the barrier based microreactor, which conveniently allows us to operate in multiple parallel channels under identical conditions. Using this approach, we have constructed a mid-size unit with a productivity of up to 2 m³/day.

In the second half of the presentation, I will be presenting some of the catalytic multiphase reactions in which we are applying microreactors: the direct production of hydrogen peroxide using undiluted mixtures of hydrogen and oxygen and the production of hydrogen from biofeeds using aqueous phase reforming. For both these reactions wall-coated capillary microreactors are used. The benefits of using microreactors for these reactions will be discussed and it will be shown that these reactors do indeed have a superior performance compared to conventional reactors.

 

Xander Nijhuis is working as an associate professor in Catalysis Engineering in the Chemical Reactor Engineering group headed by Prof Jaap Schouten at Eindhoven University. He obtained PhD in 1997 and did a post-doctoral fellowship for five years afterwards in the group of prof. Jacob Moulijn at Delft University of Technology, where he worked on transient catalysis and structured catalysts.  From 2002 until 2006 he worked as an assistant professor in spectroscopy engineering in the group of prof Bert Weckhuysen  at Utrecht University. At the end of 2006, Xander moved to Eindhoven University.

Xander Nijhuis works on the interface between reactor engineering and catalysis. He currently has his own research group, consisting of 2 post-doctoral fellows, 6 PhD students and several M.Sc. students. Topics include microreactor technology, structured reactors, and novel catalyst development. One his research focal points is gold catalysis for the direct epoxidation of propene. Currently he has over 100 papers published in international refereed journal, including 5 highly cited papers (>100 citations).