Mass transfer and chemical reaction in gas-liquid-liquid systems

Gas-liquid-liquid reaction systems may be encountered in several important fields of application as e.g. hydroformylation, alkylation, carboxylation, polymerisation, hydrometallurgy, biochemical processes and fine chemicals manufacturing. However, the reaction engineering aspects of these systems have only been considered occasionally. For systems with very slow reaction kinetics this is not surprising, as the three phases will be at physical equilibrium. In reaction systems with fast parallel and consecutive reactions the effects of mass transfer and mixing on the product yield can be significant. A fascinating example of such a reaction system is the Koch synthesis of Pivalic Acid. In this work this reaction system was chosen as model system to study these effects.