Engineering and scale-up considerations for microwave induced reactions

Researchers in the area of microwave induced reactions have used many types of hardware, from modified kitchen microwave ovens to commercial generators with waveguide applicators. While in many instances the engineering performance of the hardware is not important in laboratory scale, there are also performance-sensitive experiments. When an experiment becomes successful enough to make one think of scale-ups, then microwave engineering considerations become critical. In this paper figures of merit of microwave systems and applicator configurations are discussed. Prospects for scale-up of microwave chemical reactions are considered by citing recent development in the commercial microwave industry, as well as off-the-shelf equipment. Various large scale applicator configurations are also compared for their possible suitability for inducing reactions.