Cooled tube reactor – Features

All Vapourtec cooled tube reactors contain a coil housed inside an insulated glass manifold. Temperature can be easily controlled by cooled air around the reactor. Vapourtec cooled tube reactors, therefore, do not need to be wound tightly around any sort of former to achieve thermal conductivity, so as a result have little or no physical stress and are also kept at a uniform temperature with no hotspots. This results in more precise control of reaction temperature and long reactor life.

All reactors can be switched in seconds with no tools.

Cooled tube reactor features

cooled reactor on E-series

 

  • PFA reactor tubing – resistant to strong acids
  • Ambient down to -70°C
  • Precooled reagent feeds
  • Cooled mixing
  • Cooled post reaction quenching
  • Standard available sizes 2, 5 and 10ml
  • Can accept DualCore™ reactor coils
  • No icing up
  • No external recirculating chiller required

 

How does the cooled tube reactor work ?

cooled reactor vapourtec

The standard Vapourtec system controls temperature by blowing air around the reactor within the reactor manifold.  Hot air is used to raise the reactor temperature, ambient air is used to cool it.

With the new cooled tube reactor module, a dry ice-cooled gas generator is used to generate chilled nitrogen which is used to cool the cooled tube reactor down to the low temperatures required.  No external recirculating chiller is required, and the reactor temperature set point is completely programmable, under the control of either the simple front panel controls or the R-Series control software.

(New users are often strangely skeptical of the forced convection temperature control used by Vapourtec – until they have used it.  It is clean, reliable, and provides extremely accurate temperature control). Because the reactor tube is surrounded on all sides by the temperature controlled gas, conductivity is actually better than the line contact achieved by winding a reactor tube around a metal mandrel.  And the new cooled tube reactor module is no exception.


 

“Pre-cooling” and Quenching

Cooled tube reactor on R-Series

Often cooling is required to slow down what would otherwise be a very rapid reaction.  But there is no point in cooling a reactor if the reagents have already been mixed (and started reacting) upstream of the cooled region because the reaction will already have been partially completed by the time it enters the cooled area.  Furthermore, rapid exothermic reactions can dissipate a significant amount of heat in the actual mixer, which needs to be removed.

For this reason, Vapourtec has included the mixer that precedes the reactor within the cooled housing, along with the actual reactor, so the reagents are already in the cooled zone when they first meet. Not only that but the lengths of the “pre-cooling tube” before the mixer ensure that the reagents are already at the target temperature before they are brought together.
There is also provision for a second mixer after the reactor, enabling inline quenching to occur before the reaction products leave the cooled zone.


 

What else will I need to use this new cooled tube reactor ?

  • You will need the Vapourtec cooled gas generator, access to dry ice, and a supply of dry nitrogen.
  • Your Vapourtec system may need upgrading to be compatible with the new module.
  • No additional recirculating chiller, water supply, or other cooling equipment is required.

Get in touch

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