About Corning® Advanced-Flow™ Reactors | Continuous Flow Reactors | Corning

Advanced-Flow Reactors: A Disruptive Technology

AFR: A Disruptive Technology

Corning innovation brings significant performance benefits to the chemical and pharmaceutical processing industries through Corning® Advanced-Flow™ Reactors – a full range of continuous flow reactor products designed to enable the conversion from traditional batch to continuous flow processing for lab to industrial-scale production.

AFR Technology is backed by Corning’s nearly 170-year history of delivering life-changing innovations. Leveraging our expertise in glass science, we deliver flow reactor equipment and auxiliaries that increase the efficiency, scalability, yields, and quality of chemical processing, while improving safety and reducing environmental impact, performance variability, and cost.

The global AFR team is committed to helping industry leaders enhance products and product manufacturing processes with Corning’s cost-effective solutions, specialized engineering support, and unparalleled process expertise.

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Advantages of AFR Technology

Advantages

Shorter reactions
  • can reduce reaction time from hours to seconds
  • seamless scale-up from lab to industrial-scale production

Better selectivity
  • excellent mixing and heat management ensures uniform
    temperatures and concentrations
  • can avoid side reactions and suppress impurities and
    unstable intermediates

Improved yields
  • can increase conversion and selectivity leading to improved yields
  • enables customers to meet high quality demands



Inherently safer operations
  • small chemical load in reactor can significantly reduce the
    impact of accidents
  • recognized as an Inherently Safer Technology (IST)

Reduced impact
  • can generate less waste and greenhouse gases per volume
    of final product
  • enables compliance with safety and environmental regulations

Lower cost
  • enables high quality end-products with high yields and
    lower manufacturing costs
  • easier logistics and potential for less downtime and simplified
    downstream processes and loads

Corning's Fluidic Module Design

Fluidic Module Design

Every reactor in our portfolio is built around the same keystone component – our integrated fluidic module, a uniquely designed and meticulously engineered reactor plate made of either specialty glass or specialty silicon carbide (SiC). Our “Heat Exchange and Advanced Reaction Technology” (HEART) design enables rapid and seamless scale-up from lab scale to industrial production, as well as improved heat transfer and mass transfer (mixing) compared to batch reactors and other benchmarked flow reactors.

Corning’s fluidic modules also feature small internal channels to reduce reaction volume, leading to inherently safer processing and the ability to accommodate highly exothermic reactions.

afr fluidic module

More Than a Decade of Innovation

afr timeline 2002-2020

In the early 2000s, perceiving a need for more robust materials, better reactor design, higher throughput, and greater ease of scale-up, Corning scientists leveraged our expertise in glass science to design a better continuous flow reactor for pharmaceutical applications.

We launched our first reactor in 2006 and have since expanded our portfolio to include products for academia and lab feasibility to process development to large-scale industrial production.