Abstract

Aromatic Nitration: From Kinetics to Microreaction Technology

Jing Song, Research Fellow, Tsinghua University

Aromatic nitration has long been regarded as a hazardous reaction process, and achieving its intrinsic safety remains a major concern. Starting from the fundamental principles governing reaction processes, we established a methodology for studying nitration kinetics that eliminates transport limitations, thereby revealing the reaction laws of aromatic nitration. We demonstrated that aromatic nitration involves an inherent trade-off effect between conversion and selectivity. Although microreaction technology can significantly enhance the spatiotemporal yield of aromatic nitration, suppressing side reactions remains a critical challenge for its industrial application. By analyzing the dynamic evolution of the nitration process, we identified the key mechanism for inhibiting over-nitration side reaction and proposed a novel microreactor configuration to overcome this trade-off effect. This approach enables high conversion and high selectivity simultaneously, while markedly reducing high-energy byproducts in the reaction system, providing an effective route toward intrinsically safer nitration processes.