Fixed Bed & Fluidized Bed Reactors:

We provides specialized reactor systems for heterogeneous catalysis, the cornerstone of modern chemical and pharmaceutical manufacturing. We design both Fixed Bed Reactors (FBRs) and Fluidized Bed Reactors.

Fixed Bed Reactors: Precision in Catalytic Screening

Pilon’s Fixed Bed Reactors are engineered for rigorous catalyst testing and process development under well-defined, controlled conditions.

• R&D Applications for FBR (Fixed bed reactor)
• Catalyst Screening & Kinetics: Excellent for evaluating catalyst lifetime, activity, and selectivity. Plug-flow characteristics allow for accurate kinetic data acquisition and deactivation studies.
• High Pressure Process Development: It is Excellently suited for gas-liquid-solid reactions, such as hydrogenations, hydrotreating, and oxidations, where precise control over pressure and temperature is critical.
• Process Intensification: Enable continuous processing of reactions traditionally performed in batch, improving efficiency and simplifying product separation.

Fluidized Bed Reactors: Mastering Dynamic Reaction Environments

For processes requiring superior heat transfer and dealing with catalyst deactivation, our Fluidized Bed Reactors offer a dynamic solution.

• R&D Applications for Fluidized bed Reactors:
• Exothermic and Catalytic Reactions: The intense mixing and near-isothermal conditions prevent hotspot formation, making them perfect for highly exothermic reactions like Fischer-Tropsch synthesis or fluid catalytic cracking (FCC) studies.
• Catalyst Regeneration Studies: Facilitate continuous in-situ catalyst regeneration, essential for researching processes where catalysts coke rapidly.
• Gas-Solid Reactions with Fine Particles: Perfect for applications in combustion, gasification, and particle coating technologies, where uniform gas-solid contact is paramount.

Catalytic Innovation:

Choosing the right reactor geometry is critical to successful scale-up. we are expertise ensures your R&D in areas like sustainable fuels, specialty chemicals, and API synthesis is built on a foundation of robust and scalable reactor technology. We provide the tools to de-risk your development pathway from lab to pilot plant.

 Slurry Flow Reactors:

Slurry Flow Reactors: Mastering Three-Phase Reaction Engineering)

Pilon’s Slurry Flow Reactors enables the inherently challenging three phases (gas-liquid-solid) reactions, where a solid catalyst/reagent must be contacted efficiently with both liquid and gaseous reactants in a continuous process flow. A much better product technology still relies on batch autoclaves and suffers from traditional batch processes’ inefficiencies. The Slurry Flow Reactor provides an unprecedented amount of control for catalytic and synthesis complexities.

R&D Advantages for Advanced Synthesis:

• Enhanced Mass & Heat Transfer: Continuous movement of catalyst particles in the liquid medium eliminates intra-particle diffusion limitations while providing excellent heat transfer rates. Continuous movement allows highly exothermic hydrogenations, oxidations, and polymerizations to have better temperature control and to avoid thermal runaway and enhance selectivity.
• Real Continuous Catalytic Processing: No more batch handling of catalysts – our reactors allow for true continuous operation with solid catalysts, meaning continuous catalyst production at steady-state conditions, process variables monitored real-time to assess catalyst activity, and operating with in-line catalyst recovery or regeneration loops. The importance of this, is essential for lifetime assessment of catalysts and process economics.
• Reacting Difficult Reaction Media: Slurry flow is a natural configuration for reactions with viscous liquid reaction media, slurries, or where solids are a feedstock reactant or reaction by-product. Slurry flow facilitates R&D to occur in biomass conversion (waste-to-value), waste valorization, or specialized polymerizations that are not possible in a batch method.

Continuous Separation & Filtration: Closing the Loop on End-to-End Flow Processing:

When aiming for genuine end-to-end continuous manufacturing, the reaction step is just one element of your entire process. Pilon Engineering specializes in Continuous Separation and Filtration technologies that are vital to real time purification, or removal of reaction impurities, and is superior to batch work-ups and the delays such bottlenecks bring to a continuous process. The added value of R&D to an integrated process design spans a number of areas:

⁕   Process Intensification with Real Time Purification: Our devices readily provide immediate removal of product (or catalyst or by-product) from a continuous flow stream. This drives the equilibria toward completion, minimizes degradation of product, and provides a means for direct recycling of reagents or solvents, all intensifying the process.

⁕   Process Controls & Automation: Continuous separation affording a fully automated integrated system, closed loop in nature, is achievable. By use of real time analytics (PAT at the upfront) stream purity could be accounted for and any adjustments to parameters at the upstream reactor or chemistry parameters could be triggered to maintain product quality without intervention.

⁕   Managing Difficult Streams. We specialize in handling challenging or complex mixtures. Our experience covers solutions for: o Solid Liquid Separation: Continuous filtration (e.g. cross flow filters, pressure nutsche filters) to rapidly remove heterogeneous catalysts or by-product salts directly from the outlet of a flow reactor.

⁕   Liquid-Liquid Separation: Inefficient separation in batch processes may become more effective due to advanced, inline membrane based separators or centrifugal contactors that can split phase while allowing rigorous mixing and contacting stages to drive the reaction forward.

Continuous Crystallization: Engineering Purity and Particle Properties:

During the last phases of synthesis in the pharmaceutical and fine chemical industries, crystallization should not solely be seen as an isolation method, but as an important purification and particle engineering unit operation. Continuous Crystallization systems from Pilon Engineering has created a way for crystallization to be performed continuously, allowing for the traditional batch crystallization art to become a science (where parameters can be monitored and controlled) in terms of being predictable, more precise and of larger scale in a flow chemistry environment. R&D Benefits for Advanced Product Development:

⁕   Predefined Control of Particle Properties – Continuous crystallizers operating in a well-managed, defined space (for example, MSMPR’s and Tubular Crystallizers) provide unparalleled control over the critical quality attributes (CQA’s) that are often important when developing formulations for drugs (i.e. crystal size distribution (CSD), polymorphic form, morphology, etc.) that can directly impact drug bioavailability, filtration rates, and product quality and stability testing.

⁕   More Reproducible & Stable Quality – Consistent steady state operation of continuous crystallizers improves reproducibility of CQA’s, especially as compared to batch processes, that often have challenges to reproducibility across scale-up or the unfortunate event of having batch-to-batch variability. The steady state operation provides a more reproducible endpoint with respect to crystal form purity being produced regardless of lab to production scale-up operations which removes jeopardy when filing with regulatory bodies.

⁕   Ease of Integration in Processes – Crystallization modules can be directly integrated to upstream continuous reactors to provide immediate crystallization of an outlet stream to the reactor, which allows for less degradation of product, oiling out being prevented, and allows for in-line purification and/or washing all in a continuous and automated train.

⁕   Faster Development and Optimization vs. Batch Processes – With the help of Process Analytical Technology (PAT), to monitor and control flow operation time allows for changes to be made to the crystallization process faster than would be observed in batch identical process conditions.