In-situ Thermal Performance Monitoring of Pharma 4.0 Flow Bioreactors

Pharma 4.0 is an application of Industry 4.0 principles to pharmaceutical industry. Flow chemistry is a method to carry out chemical reactions under well-controlled conditions in small volume reactors. Reactions carried out in the flow chemistry system are supervised under continuous quality control may satisfy some of the perquisites of Pharma 4.0 systems. In the present work the thermal interface quality of a chemical reactor assembled to a flow chemistry thermostat was investigated to detect user related assembly errors and thermal interface degradation over time. We were able to mimic a designed contamination of the thermal interface material caused by inadequate assembly as a result of glass spacers inserted between the reactor and the heat exchanger plate. The thermal resistance was characterized in several measurement setups to determine the smallest detectable change of the thermal interface. Measurements have shown that even 0.05 K/W change in thermal resistance is detectable by the investigated thermostat unit.