The cooled tubular reactor uses a small-bore PFA coil housed within a double-insulated cooling enclosure. The enclosure also contains two mixers and three coils for reagent pre-cooling. This versatile design allows reagents to be cooled before mixing and enables reactions to be quenched or diluted prior to returning to ambient conditions. Cooling is achieved using dry ice with a Vapourtec cooling module. Reactor coils can be swapped in seconds without tools or heat-transfer fluids.
Application examples
- Lithiation and Halogen–Lithium Exchange
- Grignard Additions
- Swern Oxidation
- Diazotisation Reactions
- Selective Hydride Reductions
- Ozonolysis
Cooled tubular reactor features
- Ambient to -70 °C temperature range
- Pre-cooling of 3 reagents
- Cooled reagent mixer & cooled quench mixer
- 1 ml, 2 ml, 5 ml and 10 ml reactor sizes
- Wetted materials PFA
- Residence times 5 s to 200 minutes
- Pressure up to 42 bar
Key advantages
The cooled tubular reactor provides accurate, programmable temperature control from ambient down to −70 °C. Reagents are pre-cooled before mixing using a cooled mixer, helping to minimise uncontrolled reactions. A second cooled mixer allows precise quenching of reactants when required.
How does the cooled tube reactor work?
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
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.
