Scientific article of ESR1 on Design Rules for Batch and Continuous Resolution

This part will be led by ASM of OVGU with the involvement of ESR1 at OVGU and ESR4 at ETH. Substantial knowledge was acquired in the last decades in designing, optimizing and realizing large scale continuous processes, in particular in petro-chemistry for the production of (non-crystalline) bulk chemicals. Often a direct connection of a large number of reaction and separation steps could be successfully applied. To allow for such direct coupling and to avoid undesired buffer steps, the intrinsic time constants of the relevant sub-steps have to be identified and quantified. Building on this key information, a well-established theoretical framework is available striving to match the residence times of the components in all steps by identifying and establishing suitable operating conditions including a selection of the specific unit types and sizes. Hereby, the theoretical framework developed compares the characteristic times required by each relevant individual process step with the times provided in this step as characteristic residence times. Typically Damköhler-numbers are applied to facilitate and generalize the analysis. ESR1 will provide the framework for the design of batch and continuous crystallization processes based on dimensionless numbers.