(697e) Cost Analyses of Chemical Micro Processing for Highly Intensified and High-Value Raw Material Processes - Real Business and Virtual Cases

In the last years micro process engineering was developed rapidly and commercial interest could be raised. While process intensification was demonstrated, the question remains if this novel technology can lead to economic profits. In this context, two generic cost analyses were performed for two border cases, each with a dominance of one of the two most relevant cost portions of a micro-chemical process. These are raw-material and operator costs, both being operational costs, while the micro-reactor equipment costs and even the much larger plant engineering costs are of minor relevance, expressed as annual write-down of the investment. The first case study focused on the synthesis of a high-value fine-chemical intermediate where raw-material costs outpaced even the high operator costs. The process under investigation is an economically conducted fine chemical process of the customised chemical producer AzurChem GmbH, the formation of the 4-cyanophenylboronic acid, using the benefits of micro process technology supplied by IMM GmbH [1] among others. This process is representative for several other fine and speciality chemical manufacturing processes proprietary to the AzurChem GmbH. This is the first time that a cost analysis is made accessible in open literature for a commercial chemical product made by micro process engineering, i.e. for a real-case scenario with validated data base, i.e. real yields, micro-chemical plant, chemical and operator costs. Among other information, it was found that that product related fixed costs (CAPEX costs) have a share of 4% to the total cost allocation, while variable (OPEX) and remaining fixed costs were 63% and 33%, respectively. Among the variable costs, reagents were 65.8%, operator's salary 32.1%, disposal costs 1.5%, and energy consumption 0.6%. The other study refers to a highly intensified process, the Kolbe-Schmitt synthesis with reaction times being reduced by three orders of magnitude, from some hours to some tens of seconds [2]. Correspondingly, space-time yield and productivity were increased using this so-called high-p,T micro processing concept. For a given productivity, which was 4.4 t/a, the operator costs are notably reduced for the micro-chemical process as compared to a batch process. A detailed view on the different cost portions will be given and demonstrated how these variables and the total costs change, For both case studies, the impact of process intensification (e.g. by scale-out) and parallel operation (e.g. by numbering-up) was pointed out. It turns out, e.g., that for an economical micro-chemical operation the use of ?novel chemistry' concepts is crucial. The share of product costs between the micro-chemical operation with following the batch case (no high-p,T), with high-p,T, external numbering-up to 10 lines, and further 10-fold process intensification is 305 : 1.62 : 1.01 : 1. Selectivity case studies are included as well. As often claimed, it is now validated that this is a figure of merit also for the economical view, leading here to 15% selectivity improvement.