1 Reaction Calorimetry: General Aspects

To identify optimal operating conditions of a chemical process, knowledge of kinetic and thermodynamic parameters for the most important main and side reactions is needed. A conventional method for investigating a reaction during process development is reaction calorimetry (RC). ^[1] RC is the technique accepted as the most leading method to study the process in near-to-the-industrial conditions. One of the objectives of RC is to simulate an industrial process at bench scale, allowing a wide spectrum of operation conditions and measurements.

Areas of application of reaction calorimetry include determination of calorimetric data for reactions and process design, for the kinetic characterization of chemical reactions and of physical changes, for on-line monitoring of heat release and other analytical parameters needed in subsequent process development as well as for the development and optimization of chemical processes with the objective, for instance, to increase yield or profitability, control the morphology or degree of polymerization and/or index of polydispersity, etc.

However, there is a remarkable disproportion between the three main areas occupied today by RC, namely hazards, process design/optimization and for monitoring the physico-chemical transformations. If there is an extensive activity in the field of hazards, often with little contribution to increased safety, probably less than 20% of the process development laboratories use calorimeters for process design and optimization; very little interest is shown for the use of heat released as a tracer for physico-chemical transformations since RC is still barely used in...