Increased Throughput Delivered by the New H-Cube® Pro

The H-Cube^® Pro improves upon the original H-Cube® by offering greater hydrogen production (up to 60 mL/min) for higher throughput, wider temperature range (from 10 - 150 °C) including - for the first time - active cooling for more selective reactions. Importantly, reactants can be hydrogenated at higher concentrations with a 70 mm CatCart^® that is uniformly heated, regardless of flow rate.

Users may vary the amount of hydrogen produced at each pressure level between 0 and 60 mL/min offering greater reaction control. In this application note, we compare the H-Cube® with the new H-Cube^® Pro in terms of throughput.

The aim is to see how much more concentrated we can run a reaction on the H-Cube^® Pro by taking advantage of the greater hydrogen production capability. The reduction of 2,4-dinitroanisole was chosen as a model reaction because the reaction has high hydrogen demand (6 mol H2 per 1 mol substrate) since it involves the reduction of two nitro groups. The comparative study results are displayed in Table 1.

Table 1. shows that the maximum concentration possible, whilst still achieving complete hydrogenation of the two nitro groups, is 0.05 M on the H-Cube® and 0.14 M on the H-Cube^® Pro. This is an increase in throughput of 2.8 times. This application demonstrates the increase in productivity that can be achieved by using the expanded hydrogen production capabilities of the H-Cube^® Pro.