Robotic high throughput technology (HTT) workstations are mainly used to support combinatorial chemistry and screening for new compounds and catalysts. Their potential to provide useful information for commercial, chemical engineering, safety, environmental and legal aspects of process development is not realised.

Commercial automated jacketed reactor systems with vessel sizes around 50 ml and above provides efficient stirring, accurate dosing and individually instrumented and computer controlled cooling and generally provide reliable data for process scale up studies. Small scale HTT equipment may have this capability but this does not readily translate into the capacity (rates of mixing, mass and heat transfer and accurate dosing) necessary to provide reliable data for process scale up. The interaction of physical parameters are crucial to process design and scale up. For example heat and mass transfer as well as mixing need to be understood before the chemical industry can apply HTT to the development of new processes.

Utilising the HTT platform ChemSpeed SLT 106 synthesizer and the reaction calorimeter HEL SIMULARTM physical properties that affect scalability (mixing and agitation, temperature, handling and dispensing and particle dynamics) have been examined for three different sized reactor vessels. The vessel sizes are 13 ml, 100 ml (ChemSpeed SLT 106 synthesizer) and 1000 ml (HEL SIMULARTM) respectively.

By using reproducible experiments these factors that affect scalability are characterised for each reaction vessel. The results are converted into the appropriate rates i.e. rate of heat transfer and the rate of mass transfer. These rates are then related to dimensionless groups via dimensionless analysis. For instance for mass transfer the relevant groups are the Reynolds (Re) and Sherwood (Sh) numbers and for heat transfer they are the Reynolds and Nusselt (Nu) numbers. The dimensionless space in which the measurements are presented should be invariant to scale. It was found while this maybe the case for the 100ml ChemSpeed SLT 106 synthesizer reactors and the 1000ml HEL SIMULARTM reactor, it is not for the 13ml reactors. The outcome of this is that it is not possible to produce reliable data for scalability studies from the 13ml ChemSpeed SLT 106 synthesizer reactors in its current settings.

Keywords: High Throughput Technology, Heat and Mass Transfer and Scaling