This review summarizes recent advances in microflow photochemical technologies and transformations. The portfolio of reactions comprises homogeneous and heterogeneous types, among them photoadditions, photorearrangements, photoreductions, photodecarboxylations, photooxygenations and photochlorinations. While microflow photochemistry is most commonly employed as a micro-scale synthesis tool, scale-up and technical production processes have already been developed.

A series of acetone-sensitized photodecarboxylation reactions involving phthalimides have been investigated using conventional and microphotochemistry. Both, intra- and intermolecular transformations were compared. In all cases examined, the reactions performed in microreactors were superior in terms of conversions or isolated yields. These findings unambiguously prove the advantage of microphotochemistry over conventional photochemical techniques.

A novel, multimicrocapillary flow reactor (MμCFR) was constructed and applied to a series of sensitized photoadditions involving 2(5H)-furanones. The reactor allowed for rapid and energy-, time-, and space-efficient sensitizer screening, process optimization, validation, scale-up, and library synthesis.

High-throughput microbiological experimentation using droplet microfluidics is limited due to the complexity and restricted versatility of the available detection techniques. Current detection setups are bulky, complicated, expensive, and require tedious optical alignment procedures while still mostly limited to fluorescence. In this work, we demonstrate an optofluidic detection setup for multi-parametric analyses of droplet samples by easily integrating micro-lenses and embedding optical fibers for guiding light in and out of the microfluidic chip. The optofluidic setup was validated for detection of absorbance, fluorescence, and scattered light. The developed platform was used for simultaneous detection of multiple parameters in different microbiological applications like cell density determination, growth kinetics, and antibiotic inhibition assays. Combining the high-throughput potential of droplet microfluidics with the ease, flexibility, and simplicity of optical fibers results in a powerful platform for microbiological experiments.

Three types of micro-photoreactor setups were investigated using DMBP-sensitized additions of isopropanol to furanones as model reactions. The results were compared to experiments using a conventional batch reactor. Based on conversion rates, reactor geometries and energy efficiency calculations the microsystems showed superior performances over the batch process. Of the three micro setups examined, the LED-driven microchip gave the best overall results.

No abstract

The DMBP-sensitized addition of isopropanol to furanones was studied in a novel LED-driven microchip reactor. Complete conversions were achieved after just 2.5 to 5 min of irradiation with 6 × 365 nm high-power LEDs. The results were compared to analogous experiments using a conventional batch reactor.

To efficiently exploit the potential of several millions of droplets that can be considered as individual bioreactors in microfluidic experiments, methods to encode different experimental conditions in droplets are needed. The approach presented here is based on coencapsulation of colored polystyrene beads with biological samples. The decoding of the droplets, as well as content quantification, are performed by automated analysis of triggered images of individual droplets in‐flow using bright‐field microscopy. The decoding strategy combines bead classification using a random forest classifier and Bayesian inference to identify different codes and thus experimental conditions. Antibiotic susceptibility testing of nine different antibiotics and the determination of the minimal inhibitory concentration of a specific antibiotic against a laboratory strain of Escherichia coli are presented as a proof‐of‐principle. It is demonstrated that this method allows successful encoding and decoding of 20 different experimental conditions within a large droplet population of more than 105 droplets per condition. The decoding strategy correctly assigns 99.6% of droplets to the correct condition and a method for the determination of minimal inhibitory concentration using droplet microfluidics is established. The current encoding and decoding pipeline can readily be extended to more codes by adding more bead colors or color combinations.