Enhancing mass transport to accelerate photoreactions and enable scale-up

Abstract

The importance of mixing in photoreactors along the direction of light propagation for competitive photochemical reactions is experimentally demonstrated in the MISCOP mini-plant photoreactor. The installation of customized static mixers improved the photonic efficiency of the photochemical ring-opening isomerization of 1,3,3-trimethylindolino-6′-nitrobenzopyrylospirane by a factor of 2.4, which could be related to the improved mass transport. This knowledge enables future scaling of photoreactions in multi-lamp reactors.