Mettler Toledo has released a new white paper entitled “Enhanced Development and Control of Continuous Processes: A Review of Modern Technologies” in the company’s extensive collection of thought-leadership resources.

The new paper reviews flow chemistry’s revolutionary role in pharmaceutical and fine chemistry environments, including its ability to enhance product quality, increase yield, elucidate synthetic route and improve reaction safety, all while reducing cycle time, which is critical to reducing development costs and capturing market share in today’s competitive manufacturing arena.

The paper explores mid-infrared (IR) spectroscopy as a convenient and non-destructive method for real-time inline flow chemistry monitoring, because it allows real-time data-gathering on the formation of products and reactive intermediates. This instantaneous feedback on how changing a parameter such as flow rate or reaction temperature affects a reaction enables faster, safer and more cost-effective process optimization.

The intensity of IR energy absorbed at a particular wavelength is defined by Beer’s law to be proportional to concentration, making it possible to track the relative concentration of individual reaction components using mid-IR-enabled technology. Employing this type of technology not only results in improved reaction understanding; it also allows researchers to overcome what used to be significant optimization issues, such as making a controlled addition of reagent stoichiometries to a product stream using output data from a prior reaction stage when performing multi-step synthesis.

The paper describes specific instances where mid-IR technology and flow chemistry principles were applied to monitor product streams/dispersion effects in continuous flow reactors and allowed successful third-stream reagent addition, helping to eliminate poor reaction control and the waste it produces.

Mettler Toledo provides the enabling technology, software and people that can help build a seamless workflow to translate bench scale chemistry into a commercial process. Companies have used that knowledge to accelerate the discovery, development and scale-up of new chemical processes spanning the chemical and biopharmaceutical industries.