Fine chemicals and pharmaceuticals are high value added products that are produced in modest quantities. They are usually seasonal products that are customer specific and have a short shelf life. These characteristics usually placed a significant constraint in their production, such that it is not uncommon to see labour intensive batch processes being used instead of the more efficient continuos process. This usually led to a significant waste generation during the scale-up from the laboratory to production scale. In addition, the use of hazardous and often toxic homogeneous catalysts makes the product purification and waste disposal an important issue in today's stringent environmental regulations. Microchemical systems offer a new paradigm for meeting these challenges. Recent advances in the design and fabrication of micromixers, microseparators and microreactors bring closer the realization of desktop miniature factories and micropharmacies. They represent a cheap alternative way for the production of specialty chemicals and pharmaceuticals by a continuous process, allowing simpler process optimization, rapid design implementation, better safety and easier scale-up through replication. This enables rapid product deployment to the marketplace and thus ensuring a significant competitive edge. New basic zeolite catalysts obtained by grafting amino groups onto NaX and CsNaX zeolites exhibit excellent catalytic activities for Knoevenagel condensation reaction between benzaldehyde and ethyl cyanoacetate (ECA), ethyl acetoacetate (EAA) and diethyl malonate (DEM). The CsNaX-NH{sub}2 catalyst displays higher conversion compared to aminopropylated MCM-41 for benzaldehyde reaction with ECA and DEM (Figure. 1).
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