(545b) Scalable Modular Manufacturing of Crystals with Improved Uniformity

The pharmaceutical, material, and chemical industry has increased demands for reproducible and efficient green manufacturing of crystalline ingredients and/or products. For many key ingredients of these products (e.g., amino acids, fine chemicals), uniformity and consistency in quality across different scales/stages is a must, and a huge challenge for existing batch processes.This talk focuses on the slug-flow (or segmented flow) crystallizer design, which is one of the effective continuous processes demonstrated to allow enhanced control of crystal properties such as size and shape. The slurry flow is combined with gas flow and fed to a tube to induce a multiphase hydrodynamic instability that spontaneously generates well-mixed slugs where the crystals continue to grow. Experimental validation confirms that the proposed designs reduce development time by orders of magnitude while suppressing secondary nucleation, attrition, and clogging/fouling dominant but undesired phenomena that worsen the ability to quality control.