The Effect of Self-Optimisation Targets on the Methylation of Alcohols Using Dimethyl Carbonate in Supercritical CO2

This paper describes the next stage in our development of self-optimising reactors. We demonstrate that the same reaction can be optimised for a series of different criteria including yield, space-time yield, E factor and a weighted yield function (the product of space-time yield and yield). In different experiments, we achieved 97.6% yield, space-time yield of 42.9 kg/L/h and E factors of 1.4 and 3.3 (including CO2) and the weighted yield, which gave a promising balance between yield, E factor and space-time yield.