The most common reaction on Earth is photochemical: namely, photosynthesis. ‘Yet photochemistry is still rarely found in scaled-up industrial processes’, says Koen Van Aken, Creaflow’s CSO. The company is based in BlueChem Antwerp. ‘However, there is growing interest in using photochemistry as an alternative energy source because it opens up avenues that are not possible with traditional chemistry.’ That is why Van Aken, together with business partner Ajinomoto OmniChem, a Belgian producer of active pharmaceutical ingredients and fine chemicals, started developing new photochemical reactors for industry.

However, they soon realised why photochemistry is so difficult to scale up. ‘After the first few millimetres of your reaction matrix, it’s actually already a dark zone in terms of photochemistry, which, by definition, excludes batch reactors’, explains Van Aken. ‘You also have to take heat management into account because light is accompanied by heat.’

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Nevertheless, they succeeded in designing a two-millimetre-deep plate reactor that allows for intense mixing and heat exchange through a combination of static mixing elements and a pulsating flow. ‘That reactor was actually too good to keep to ourselves, so that’s where the idea for the start-up came from.’ What makes the reactor even more special is that the mixing intensity and flow rate are independent of each other. ‘It is a design that can be easily scaled up without adjusting the conditions of your reaction. It also enables processes involving solid particles, such as heterogeneous photocatalysis, as demonstrated by Timothy Noël [University of Amsterdam, ed.], among others.’

‘That reactor was actually too good to keep to ourselves.’

Koen Van Aken

The reactor has an inspection window along its entire length, so it is possible to visually monitor multiphase reactions. ‘This is unique because reactors are usually black boxes’, says Van Aken. ‘It also offers opportunities to follow the kinetics of the reaction through the window using Raman spectroscopy and near-infrared spectroscopy. Plus, it is the first electrochemical reactor that you can look into.’ This makes it a highly flexible technology for all kinds of chemistry that can easily be scaled up. ‘Previously, the thinking was that upscaling was where the nightmare began. But now you can expand in all dimensions without process development.’

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When asked what he is most proud of, Van Aken quotes Star Trek: ‘We have gone “where no man has gone before”. Our reactor opens up areas that were traditionally impossible to access; it is truly groundbreaking in the field of flow reactors.’ Creaflow has also acquired five of the top ten largest pharmaceutical companies as customers. ‘As a start-up, we were very quickly embraced by the market.’

Rik Van Meirhaeghe, Creaflow’s CEO for the past year, adds: ‘You can see that we are able to substantiate our performance thanks to the many purely scientific publications. We have good collaborations in the field of flow chemistry, and our scientific basis is so thorough that it contributes to business success.’ The next step is to expand further into large industrial versions. ’We offer assistance from the R&D phase right through to production’, Van Meirhaeghe continues. ’The advantage of our technology is that time to market is much faster, and building a pilot line is no longer necessary because scaling up is so easy.’