Application
See your flow reaction as it happens
A continuous reactor gives you precise control over residence time, temperature and reaction conditions. The OrionIR® brings mid-IR analysis into the process stream itself, so conversion, reaction rate and endpoint are read continuously rather than reconstructed from samples.
Your reactor is continuous. Your analysis should not be batch by batch
In conventional flow development, samples are collected by hand and sent for offline analysis. That opens a gap between what is happening inside the reactor and when you find out about it — and the gap is widest exactly where flow chemistry earns its value.
What that gap costs
- The reaction changes faster than the sampling interval, so transient behaviour falls between two samples.
- HPLC or GC results arrive long after the material they describe has moved downstream.
- Residence time is not the whole story: mixing, dispersion and bypassing all change the real history of the material.
- Optimisation slows to the speed of the laboratory — each condition has to be sampled, analysed and interpreted before the next one can be tried.
How it works
Where the instrument sits
A compact transmission flow cell on the outlet or on a recirculation loop, reading the stream that is already moving.
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01
Feed
Reagents metered into the system at the flow rate the chemistry needs.
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02
Mixer
The point where contact begins and the reaction starts to run.
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03
Flow reactor
Residence time, temperature and pressure held where you set them.
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04
OrionIR®
A 0.1 mL flow cell in the stream, returning a spectrum every second and a concentration from it.
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05
Product
Material leaving the reactor with a measured history rather than an assumed one.
What you read from it
One instrument, answering the questions a flow chemist asks continuously.
Conversion
Reactant depletion and product formation, followed rather than sampled.
Reaction rate
How quickly the reaction moves as you change a condition.
Endpoint
The point at which the target conversion is reached, without waiting for an offline result.
Process stability
Disturbances, transients and unexpected changes as they happen.
Selectivity
Impurity trends alongside the main product, in the same spectrum.
Steady state
Confirmed by a flat trace rather than assumed after a fixed number of reactor volumes.
Residence time
The distribution measured on the reactor you actually built.
Start-up material
Off-spec material identified while it is being made, so it can be diverted.
From samples to a live reaction
The traditional loop: flow reactor → sample → quench → HPLC or GC → wait → result → decision.
With the OrionIR®: flow reactor → inline flow cell → spectrum → concentration → decision.
Measure continuously, understand immediately, and act before the process has moved on.
Where it makes a difference
Reaction development
Understand quickly how temperature, flow rate, reagent ratio and residence time change conversion.
Process optimisation
Replace discrete measurements with a continuous reaction profile.
Continuous manufacturing
Catch a deviation before it becomes off-spec material.
Scale-up
Compare reaction behaviour across flow conditions and reactor configurations.
Automated experimentation
Feed real-time analytical data straight into an automated optimisation loop.
Hazardous chemistry
Continuous flow already reduces the inventory at risk; a live measurement adds visibility of what the chemistry is doing.
Characterising the reactor itself
Before conversion means anything at a new scale you need the residence time distribution of the reactor you actually built. We measured it by step tracer on a coiled tubular reactor — 10 mass% acetone in absolute ethanol, step-up and step-down transitions, at 0.4, 0.8 and 1.0 mL·min⁻¹. Measured peak residence times matched theoretical prediction at every flow rate, and the curves resolved the secondary features — bypassing, dispersion and tailing — that a nominal calculation cannot produce.
The same measurement runs automatically in the instrument software's RTD tab, using a preconfigured ethanol–acetone solvent–tracer system, with no external chemometric model and no offline post-processing.
Why mid-IR for flow
- Direct chemical information — functional-group vibrations, not a proxy signal.
- One spectrum a second, so a transient is a feature of the curve rather than a missed sample.
- A 0.1 mL void volume, so almost nothing is held up in the cell.
- Nothing is stopped, diverted or quenched to make the measurement.
- Aqueous and strongly absorbing streams are readable at a 20 µm path, within the instrument's validated range.
- Chemometric models turn the spectrum into the concentrations you actually control.
Flow chemistry controls where and how long the chemistry happens. Mid-IR tells you what chemistry is actually happening.
Moving a synthesis into flow?
Send the chemistry, the solvent, the concentration range you need to resolve and the reactor you are running it in. Where it makes sense we measure your own samples before you commit.