CAD of Microwave Chemistry Reactors with Energy Efficiency Optimized for Multiple Reactants

Upgrade of successful processes of microwave-assisted organic synthesis to the level of industrial technologies is currently slowed down by difficulties in experimental development of large-scale and high-productive reactors. This paper proposes to address this issue by developing microwave chemistry reactors as microwave systems rather than black-box-type units for chemical reactions. We suggest an approach based on application of a neural network optimization technique to a microwave system in order to improve its coupling (and thus energy efficiency). The RBF network optimization with CORS sampling introduced in our earlier work and capable of exceptionally quick convergence to the optima due to a dramatically reduced number of underlying 3D FDTD analyses is upgraded here to account for additional practically important condition requiring the reactor’s optimal design for different reactants. Efficiency of the approach is illustrated by two examples optimizing the geometry of a conventional microwave reactor for 3 different materials: with 1/5 liter reactants, seven-parameter optimization yields the best configurations from only 297/195 FDTD simulations on a regular PC.