Flow Chemistry Projects at RCPE and University of Graz

For the past decade the focus of research in the Kappe laboratories has been directed towards flow chemistry/microreaction technology, encompassing a wide variety of synthetic transformations and experimental techniques. Funding for these initiatives has been obtained mainly from the Austrian Science Fund (FWF: „Microwave-accelerated Catalysis in Flowthrough Reactors“, 2004-2007), from the Christian Doppler Research Society (CDG: Christan Doppler Laboratories for Microwave (2006-2013) and Flow Chemistry (2013-2015), and from the Austrian Research Promotion Agency (FFG: COMET K-Project „Center for Continuous Flow Synthesis and Processing“, 2017-2021).

Apart from fundamental research on flow chemistry, microreactor technology, process intensification and continuous processing covering a wide range of scientific disciplines (see, Research), the Kappe laboratory is actively engaged in collaborations with industrial partners, mainly from the pharmaceutical sector. In addition, to develop new chemical transformations of interest to API synthesis in flow mode, one of the main objectives is to transfer batch to intensified and scalable commercial continuous processes.

Over the past decade collaborative flow chemistry projects with various pharmaceutical and agrochemical companies have been pursued. These have led to more than 80 joint publications with industry in addition to patents and validated flow protocols for industrial implementation (see Figure below). As one of the key goals of the laboratory is to provide scalable solutions, the participation of contract manufacturing organizations (CMOs) with documented experience in commercial scale continuous processing is of critical importance. Similarly, Microinnova (near Graz, Austria), a company specializing in process integration and process intensification is a strategic partner. Some of our collaboration partners are listed below. For an overall list of our more than 200 flow chemistry publications, see here: Publications

Reference to publications (first/most recent paper) is provided with the number of overall joint publications with an industrial partner given in parenthesis.