Hydrogenation

Hydrogenations are involved in over 25% of organic chemistry steps during the multiple-stage synthesis in the pharmaceutical and fine chemical industries. The specialty chemical industry is also reliant the hydrogenation processes. Heterogeneous catalytic hydrogenations are ideal in that the reaction can be tuned for best activity and selectivity, and afterwards the catalyst can be removed by simple filtration. The optimization of a hydrogenation process requires selection of multiple parameters such as the correct catalyst, temperature, pressure, solvent, additives, and substrate-to-catalyst ratio.

Characterizing the effects of different reaction variables on hydrogenation performance can be challenging. Grab sampling is often a poor choice for hydrogenation due to oxygen sensitivity, transient intermediates reactivity, and handling of high-pressure reactors. On the other hand, hydrogen uptake monitoring only provides information on the overall rate of hydrogenation; it does not provide component-specific information, which is required for good process understanding.

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ReactIR™ is used to directly measure the liquid phase during hydrogenations. The solid catalyst is often not observed in the spectra even though the dispersions can be completely opaque (due to carbon-black-supported metal catalysts) and gas bubbles do not interfere with the measurements. MultiMaxIR™ has facilitated fast and efficient optimization of hydrogenation parameters with a unique combination of in situ ATR-FTIR monitoring and parallel automated high-pressure reactors. During scale up and manufacturing, MonARC increases batch-to batch-consistency by safely detecting real-time process variance and reaction endpoint.