Product Development Reactor

Automated Platform for Polymer Product and Process Development Studies

While the PPR is dedicated to early screening, focused on catalyst discovery and optimization, Freeslate's Product Development Reactor (PDR) is intended to target product and process screening. The traditional approach to product and process development relies on individual, large-scale reactors, but there are a number of challenges with this approach:

• Resources need to be scaled to match the number of individual reactors.
• The amount of materials required for a campaign can become a scale-up challenge.
• Difficult to reliably compare data from reactor-to-reactor and potentially from run-to-run due to poor understanding of factors influencing reproducibility.
• Handling and injecting catalysts to mimic commercial procedures.
• Aggregating, storing, and analyzing data.

Freeslate's PDR takes a new approach to polymer product development. Like the PPR, the PDR is an automated platform for parallel synthesis and polymerization studies over a range of controlled temperatures and pressures. However, instead of 48 smaller reactors, the PDR has 8 reactors, each with a 200 mL working volume and individual control over all process and compositional parameters. The larger scale allows for the production of enough material to complete preliminary performance testing, including morphology; the process control ensures a close match to future commercial conditions and relevant data to save development time and resources.

Prepare: Modularized for Flexibility in Experimentation

Like the PPR, the PDR delivers robotic preparation. Design and automation software work together to allow the robotic system to interpret a recipe containing composition and process information and prepare stock solutions, dispense materials to the array of reactors, and set the reaction conditions.

The system also allows unparalleled control over reaction conditions with injection of catalyst under pressure and feedback control of headspace composition for up to two liquids and three gases independently for each reactor.

Process: Complete Automation for Faster Time to Result

• Operation in a controlled environment: The Freeslate PDR operates in a controlled, oxygen- and moisture-free environment. The reactor and liquid handling robot are integrated into an inert atmosphere glove box to enable studies of air-sensitive chemistry.
• Exhaustive process control with rapid GC & MS for headspace composition analysis and feedback control of headspace composition.
• Individually controlled feeds for up to 3 gases (MFCs) and 2 liquids (high-pressure pumps) per reactor.
• Precision pressure and temperature control from 10-20 C and up to 80 bar to minimize overshoot and exotherm. The system can go up to 200 C at lower pressure.
• Reaction monitoring: Each cell is monitored for gas uptake in real time allowing per-reaction conversion measurement. Such real-time monitoring allows polymerization reactions to be quenched at a common conversion.
• Supports full range of polymerization types and can transition between stages:
  • Gas phase including pre-polymerization without the need for a seed bed
  • Bulk phase
  • Slurry phase
  • Automated catalyst preparation and injection

Analyze: Multi-dimensional Experimentation for Better Data Correlation

Automated Catalyst Synthesis: Choose from a number of Freeslate catalyst synthesis platforms as needed.

• Organic Synthesis Workflow
• Impregnation Synthesis Workflow
• Co-precipitation Synthesis Workflow
• Hydrothermal Synthesis Workflow

Click here to learn more about our PDR and how it can help you deliver step-change gains in your R&D.