Titelbild Chem. Ing. Tech. 10/2016

The so‐called plug & play reactor is a novel reaction device with exchangeable reaction segments as well as modules for heating/cooling and mixing. The applications of the plug & play reactor include gas/solid, liquid/solid as well as gas/liquid/solid reactions. Commercially available HPLC columns, filled with catalyst particles, can be inserted in the reaction segment to act as fixed bed reactors. No external mixing device is needed, which leads to a high compactness of the reactor. The monitoring of the reaction progress and the reaction parameters can be carried out inline and online and an easy scale‐up by increasing the pipe diameter as well as simply numbering‐up by multiplying the modules is possible. Thus, the plug & play reactor is an attractive alternative to existing batch processes and can be easily implemented in existing processes. G. J. Lichtenegger, V. Tursic, H. Kitzler, K. Obermaier, J. G. Khinast, H. Gruber‐Wölfler*, Chem. Ing. Tech. 2016 , 88 (10), 1518 – 1523. DOI: 10.1002/cite.201600013