5. Limits

Miniaturization is not a universal solution destined to reconfigure tomorrow's industrial landscape. A number of factors limit the scope of applications for these new devices.

Production capacity is intrinsically limited. We have seen that solutions for extrapolation by parallelizing units do exist. However, they will always be limited to product quantities of less than one tonne/hour. The nature of the products that can be processed in microreactors also has its limits. These include problems linked to the wettability of materials, which can make it impossible to convey certain fluids, and, more trivially, the use of solid particles, which present a risk of rapid clogging of the channels.

From an economic point of view, the traditional industrial approach is to increase the size of production units rather than duplicate them, in order to...