Specialty chemicals

Industries

Specialty chemicals

When a batch is worth more than the instrument measuring it, the cost of finding out late is not a rounding error. Reaction endpoints, selectivity and scale-up all turn on knowing concentration as it changes.

The problem

Specialty synthesis is where side reactions cost the most and where the window to intervene is shortest. A reaction that has gone past its optimum is not recoverable by holding it longer, and an exotherm that started between samples is discovered by its consequences.

Scale-up compounds it. A procedure transferred from a 1 L flask to a 1000 L reactor reproduces the temperature profile and almost nothing else — mixing, local concentration and residence time all change, and none of them are in the batch record.

What changes with a live reading

  • Endpoints called on the concentration curve flattening rather than on the validated worst-case hold time.
  • Kinetic data from a single run: a continuous trace is a dataset, sampled points are a scatter plot you fit a curve through and hope.
  • Side reactions and intermediate accumulation become visible features instead of yield you cannot account for.
  • Multiple units can run in parallel on one computer for flow chemistry setups.
  • Neat solvents including ethanol and toluene have been measured at the standard 20 µm path without absorbance saturation.

Tell us the measurement you cannot make today

Describe the stream, the chemistry and the decision it blocks. Where it makes sense we test the technology on your own process samples before you commit.