Industrial microreactor process development up to production

This chapter is about industrial applications of microprocess technology. Industry is not very active in publishing not only because of confidentiality reasons but also because of the absence of direct need for a corresponding profile. Thus, one cannot expect that the ongoing developments can be shown with a similar degree of completeness, clarity and detailedness, as this is possible for reviewing scientific contributions from academy with a wealth of peer-reviewed papers. Especially, the information of major interest of what has been transferred to production and how do the companies make profit with the new technology is usually kept secret. Thus, it has to be accepted that some information is missing among the chapters and that this is only the tip of the iceberg. Also, the sources of information are not as validated as refereed literature because in some cases one has to rely on interviews and other infomation given in a magazine format. Knowing these shortcomings, the contents were grouped in sections on industrial mission statements, laboratory process development, pilots and chemical production. For the process development part of this chapter, papers were also considered with industrial coauthors, assuming that the work was (partly) done under industrial perspective and reflects fields of interest and activity of industry.