Dr. Reddy's

	The process of bromination in the pharmaceutical industry contains non-green components like liquid bromine and chlorinated solvents. Serious safety concerns, health risks and the environmental impact that these reagents and solvents present, spurred us to develop a greener bromination process.

INTERVENTION

The new process involves using Hydrobromic Acid (HBr) and Hydrogen Peroxide instead of Bromine.

OUTCOME

The resultant bromination is safer and greener. Its highlights include:

High Atom
Economy

Uses of less
corrosive materials

By-product is water
instead of corrosive
liquid bromine

Micromix Reactor	CASE STUDY

OPPORTUNITY

Most active pharmaceutical ingredients are typically high value, small volume products and thus manufactured in batches. While batch processes offer flexibility they also pose some inherent challenges such as precise control of reaction temperature. Moreover, when the reaction shows highly exothermic behaviour and a side reaction occurs resulting from the reaction heat, the product yield in a batch operation greatly decreases.

INTERVENTION

To overcome these disadvantages we developed a continuous reactor called the 'micromixing reactor'. This reactor has a dimension of just 1" x 1" and is devised to control exothermic reaction heat and thereby enhance the product yield and even make it more consistent.

The 'micromixing reactor' efficiently eliminated the reaction heat and, as a result, virtually no impurities were produced during the reaction. They also made it possible to reach a product yield comparable to the theoretical value in a single micromixer unit.

Key features of the 'micromixing' reactors include:

	Extremely fast heat and / or mass transfer rates due to a high surface to volume ratio
	Rapid mixing by inter-digitised micro flows
	Inherently safe process operations through strictly controlled conditions
	Small amount of chemicals involved

OUTCOME

Superior productivity to that of batch process. Only 2 to 5 parallel units of the micromixer can replace a commercial 10m3 scale batch reaction vessel, leading to a dramatic decrease in capital, operational cost and carbon foot print.

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