Flow Toolkit for Measuring Reaction Enthalpy and Application to Highly Exothermic Synthesis of Alkylaluminoxanes

We present a flow strategy to characterize reaction enthalpy and showcase the application in synthesis of alkylaluminoxanes from the fast and exothermic alkylaluminum hydrolysis. Our platform mainly encompasses a three-dimensional printed micromixer and a tubular reactor in an adiabatic vacuum box, aided by a thermal imaging camera to record temperature profiles. The temperature increase at steady state is used to calculate the released heat, which is further decoupled to quantify the reaction enthalpy and enthalpy of mixing. We validate the concept with the classic neutralization reaction between sulfuric acid and sodium hydroxide, with less than 2% deviation from theoretical values. In application, we determine the exothermic reaction enthalpy and the endothermic enthalpy of mixing to be −143.13 and +7.66 kJ/mol for triisobutylaluminum hydrolysis and −164.63 and +5.03 kJ/mol for trimethylaluminum hydrolysis, respectively. The presented platform, on the one hand, yields new insights into the microreactor scale-up for alkylaluminoxane synthesis and, on the other hand, can be readily used to measure reaction enthalpies of other reactions.