Reaction monitoring in small reactors and tight spaces

face today’s development chemist. For example, the emergence of combinatorial and high-throughput methods for rapid pharmaceutical and chemical development and the use of parallel arrays of small reactors for exploratory c h e m i s t ry are becoming widespread. At the same time, entirely new approaches are being developed for synthetic chemistry. Supercritical carbon dioxide is emerging as a versatile and environmentally benign alternative to traditional solvents. This, too, presents challenges to development chemists and engineers who need real-time data on reactions inside compact, pressurized reactors. Compactly designed fiber-optic probes with full temperature and pressure capability offer a convenient way to open a mid-infrared spectroscopic “window” into reaction c h e m i s t ry on a scale down to a few milliliters and under a wide range of reaction conditions.