Case Study: Increasing yield and safety of a nitration process

Predictive simulations coupling mass & heat transfer

by Ypso-Facto
March 15, 2022

Challenge

40-year old nitration process for the production of an Active Pharmaceutical Ingredient
Highly complex process with low selectivity
Need to enhance competitiveness and improve safety

Methods

Analysis of existing performances and identification of the reaction pathway
Predictive simulations coupling mass & heat transfer
Reduction of impurity formation by optimizing the sequence of reactants loading and coupling the reaction with distillation

Achievements

Yield enhanced by a factor 4
Safety largely improved by decreasing the reactor size (using a continuous tubular reactor)

Ypso-Facto has been helping Pharmaceutical and Biopharmaceutical companies optimize their processes since 2014. We offer technology enabled services and proprietary software to solve some of our industries biggest challenges : make (bio)pharmaceutical processes safer, more cost efficient, and environmentally friendly.

We have a unique approach based on technologies which can combine multiple dimensions:

The educated guess or expertise of the experts, which we call G
The use and contextualization of experimental data, which we call X
And the predictive simulation based on mechanistic modelling, which we call P.

Depending on your product and process, we have mechanistic models that we can use, or we can work with your experimental data to build one. Altogether, that is our unique GPX approach.

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