Scaling Up Cobalt Octacarbonyl and Its Derivatives
The Challenge
A multinational chemical firm for the semiconductor industry was in a race to bring a technology to the market — so they came to us with an immediate need for a cost-effective approach to scaling-up octacarbonyl and its derivatives.
They had already attempted to synthesize the cobalt octacarbonyl in high-pressure autoclaves but this approach wasn’t cost-effective due to expensive equipment, servicing, and regulatory compliance.
Ereztech Approach
We already possessed unique expertise and technology for synthesizing cobalt octacarbonyl in a low-pressure environment for relatively small volumes (up to 2-3kg). And although our existing methodology of synthesis in glassware provided a cost-attractive approach for manufacturing cobalt octacarbonyl in small volumes, we couldn’t automatically scale it up to high-volume reactors — straight scaling up to a large reactor simply didn’t work. In addition to the technical challenges of increasing throughput, the customer required a higher purity standard, adding steps to the process.
The Results
After multiple iterations of the customer-driven process, we succeeded — not only in the transfer from low-volume glassware to a high-volume 300L metal reactor, but also in introducing several critical processes to achieve the specified purity standards that are so important in semiconductor industry. The entire process was “locked down” after a number of customer and end-user onsite audits, as well as numerous synthesized batches, permitting us to switch to the ship-to-control method of QA.
