An Affordable, Powerful, and Safe Hydrogenation Reactor for Academia
BUDAPEST, HUNGARY–(Marketwired – Mar 17, 2014) – ThalesNano Inc. announced today at the 247th ACS show that it has launched the latest member of its H-Cube flow reactor series, the H-Cube Mini™ for the academic market. The H-Cube Mini™ is the economically priced version of the original R&D Top 100 award winning hydrogenation reactor, the H-Cube®, targeted for academia and shares the following advantages and features:
- No hydrogen cylinders necessary (hydrogen is generated from water electrolysis).
- No catalyst filtering, weighing out, or clean up (catalysts are packed into disposable cartridges)
- Can handle reaction temperatures and pressures up to 100°C and 100 bar.
- Easy and user friendly to operate, so chemists at all levels can learn how to use it in minutes.
Mr. Richard Jones, CEO at ThalesNano, said: “Researchers at many universities are not allowed to utilize high pressure hydrogenation for their research due to safety concerns with handling hydrogen cylinders and pyrophoric catalysts. Undergraduates are also certainly not able to practice this valuable application during practical lab courses for the same reasons. It is essential for their future industrial or academic career to gain first hand practical experience with hydrogenation during their educational years, since approximately 5-10% of reactions in the whole of the chemical industry are types of hydrogenation. With the launch of the H-Cube Mini™ ThalesNano has now developed a safe, simple, yet powerful reactor that can be used by any level of chemist for hydrogenation and other reactions, too.”
The first system already has its future owner, Dr. Bart Roman, from the University of Gent, who will get his H-Cube Mini free as the winner of ThalesNano’s competition for the best scientific proposal on how the system will be used for research and as part of the practical laboratory session.
Dr. Roman commented his winning: “High-pressure batch hydrogenations require strict safety standards and adequate facilities. Application of microreactor technology can significantly reduce the risk associated with such transformations, and may additionally provide advantages in terms of catalyst re-use, shorter reaction times and ease of reaction optimization. Therefore, we look forward to evaluate the advantages of the H-Cube Mini in our research lines and in our industrial projects, and we will integrate its hands-on use in the curriculum of the next generation of chemical engineers.”
About ThalesNano Inc.
ThalesNano is the world leader in bench-top flow chemistry reactors. The company has the widest portfolio of bench-top continuous process instruments for the pharmaceutical, biotech, fine chemical, petroleum/biofuel, and education markets. Its R&D 100 award winning H-Cube® and scale-up system H-Cube Midi™ are used in hundreds of laboratories globally and have become the new industry standard for hydrogenation. Within three years from the original introduction of its flagship H-Cube® product, 20 out of the top 20 pharmaceutical companies have adopted the technology.