A major industrial reaction based on homogeneous catalysis is hydroformylation for the production of aldehydes from alkenes and syngas. Hydroformylation in microemulsions, which is currently under investigation at Technische Universität Berlin on a mini-plant scale, was identified as a cost efficient approach which also enhances product selectivity. Herein, we present the application of online Raman spectroscopy on the reaction of 1-dodecene to 1-tridecanal within a microemulsion. To achieve a good representation of the operation range in the mini-plant with regard to concentrations of the reactants a design of experiments was used. Based on initial Raman spectra partial least squares regression (PLSR) models were calibrated for the prediction of 1-dodecene and 1-tridecanal. Limits of predictions arise from nonlinear correlations between Raman intensity and mass fractions of compounds in the microemulsion system. Furthermore, the prediction power of PLSR models becomes limited due to unexpected by-product formation. Application of the lab-scale derived calibration spectra and PLSR models on online spectra from a mini-plant operation yielded promising estimations of 1-tridecanal and acceptable predictions of 1-dodecene mass fractions suggesting Raman spectroscopy as a suitable technique for process analytics in microemulsions.
The project InPROMPT aims to establish a robust hydroformylation reaction process of the alkene n-dodecene to the aldehyde n-tridecanal using a rhodium complex as catalyst in the presence of syngas. This industrial relevant production process demands further research for optimization and expansion. For that purpose, the fiber optic coupled probe of a process Raman spectrometer is directly introduced in the product stream, which enables the recording of spectra within short control intervals.
Medium-resolution nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy (MR-NMR) currently develops to an important analytical tool for both quality control and processmonitoring. In contrast to high-resolution onlineNMR (HR-NMR),MR-NMRcan be operated under rough environmental conditions. A continuous re-circulating stream of reaction mixture fromthe reaction vessel to the NMR spectrometer enables a non-invasive, volume integrating online analysis of reactants and products. Here, we investigate the esterification of 2,2,2-trifluoroethanol with acetic acid to 2,2,2-trifluoroethyl acetate both by 1H HR-NMR (500MHz) and 1H and 19F MRNMR (43MHz) as amodel system. The parallel online measurement is realised by splitting the flow,which allows the adjustment of quantitative and independent flow rates, both in the HR-NMR probe as well as in the MR-NMR probe, in addition to a fast bypass line back to the reactor. One of the fundamental acceptance criteria for online MR-MNR spectroscopy is a robust data treatment and evaluation strategy with the potential for automation. The MR-NMR spectra are treated by an automated baseline and phase correction using the minimum entropy method. The evaluation strategies comprise (i) direct integration, (ii) automated line fitting, (iii) indirect hard modelling (IHM) and (iv) partial least squares regression (PLS-R). To assess the potential of these evaluation strategies for MR-NMR, prediction results are compared with the line fitting data derived from the quantitative HR-NMR spectroscopy. Although, superior results are obtained from both IHM and PLS-R for 1H MR-NMR, especially the latter demands for elaborate data pretreatment, whereas IHM models needed no previous alignment.