Process Intensification in Microreactors Towards Sustainable Chemical Processes

The development of sustainable chemical processes with high efficiency is essential to build a more environmental-friendly and competitive chemical industry. This has triggered high research attention over recent years on the discovery of novel chemical transformations and the corresponding key-enabling process technologies, typically based on the widely accepted green chemistry and green engineering principles. Process intensification in microreactors holds great promises to meet these research needs. Running chemical synthesis as well as other unit operations in continuous flow mode in microreactors enables a precise control over the process parameters and a substantial transport intensification. This makes microreactors not only as a highly useful research tool on the lab scale for accelerating the discovery and optimization of more sustainable chemical processes, but also an attractive production unit for the process implementation on the pilot and plant scale.

There is an upcoming need in fully unlocking the process intensification potential of microreactors towards developing sustainable chemical processes. The aim of the current Research Topic is thus to cover the recent research highlights, trends and challenges in this field. The Research Topic will mainly focus on chemical process development in microreactors that well address the green and sustainable aspects, the process intensification advantages and the corresponding fundamental understanding thereof (e.g., flow, heat/mass transfer and reaction characteristics), the process operation/control strategies (e.g., using advanced experimental techniques), the application potential in the chemical industry.

We welcome the submission of the original research papers, reviews as well as perspective articles.
Areas to be covered in this Research Topic may include, but are not limited to:
- Discovery and optimization of novel chemical transformations in microreactors
- Process intensification advantages of microreactors
- Green chemistry and sustainability aspects in microreactor processing
- Fundamental understanding into transport and reaction properties in microreactors
- Advanced experimental/numerical techniques used in microreactors and new insights thereof
- The application potential of microreactors to uplift the current chemical industry.

Keywords: Microreactor, process intensification, chemical processes, sustainability, reaction engineering

Important note: All contributions to this Research Topic must be within the scope of the section and journal to which they are submitted, as defined in their mission statements. Frontiers reserves the right to guide an out-of-scope manuscript to a more suitable section or journal at any stage of peer review.