Abstract

The multi-disciplinary team at ICES Kilo Lab have been working on the design and construction of a meso-scale mini-plant for the continuous feeding of metals into a continuous flow system to form organometallic reagents in situ at a rate of about 100mL/hour.  

Initially, we developed a process to run a continuous Reformatsky reaction with continuous feeding of zinc metal into the system to form the reagent.  The same principles were used to design a flexible system with the capability to run reactions of industrial significance using other organometallic reagents, particularly the Grignard reaction.

Continuous preparation of the Grignard reagent ensures greater process safety by minimising inventory of the hazardous material and also allows greater flexibility of the chemistry by allowing non-commercially available Grignard reagents to be used directly in the process.  This leads to the potential to run more efficient processes by using a single stage of chemistry rather than starting with commercially available Grignard reagents and needing to carry out other transformations to achieve the desired molecule.