Integrated microfluidic reactors

Abstract

SummaryMicrofluidic reactors exhibit intrinsic advantages of reduced chemical consumption, safety, high surface-area-to-volume ratios, and improved control over mass and heat transfer superior to the macroscopic reaction setting. In contract to a continuous-flow microfluidic system composed of only a microchannel network, an integrated microfluidic system represents a scalable integration of a microchannel network with functional microfluidic modules, thus enabling the execution and automation of complicated chemical reactions in a single device. In this review, we summarize recent progresses on the development of integrated microfluidics-based chemical reactors for (i) parallel screening of in situ click chemistry libraries, (ii) multistep synthesis of radiolabeled imaging probes for positron emission tomography (PET), (iii) sequential preparation of individually addressable conducting polymer nanowire (CPNW), and (iv) solid-phase synthesis of DNA oligonucleotides. These proof-of-principle demonstrations validate the feasibility and set a solid foundation for exploring a broad application of the integrated microfluidic system.

Direct photolysis of benzoylecgonine under UV irradiation at 254nm in a continuous flow microcapillary array photoreactor

“…Miniaturized reactors have attracted significant interest in the last decade due to fast development and application of microfluidics devices [1,2]. Microchannel reactors are very promising of producing niche or high-added-value fine organic chemicals [3] such as polymers [4], novel pharmaceuticals [5], peptides and biomolecules [6,7] or for carrying highly exothermic reactions [8].…”

Design, fabrication and characterization of microreactors for high temperature syntheses

“…Chemical research is focused on the synthesis of new compounds, their application, and on process intensification. Hence, it is important to develop new equipment or techniques, which drastically improve the whole synthetic process by minimizing energy consumption, size, amount of reagents and by-products and, obviously, the total costs of the process [1,[10][11][12]. Optimization studies regarding the improvement of reaction yields as well as the minimization of undesired sub-products constitute crucial parameters to take into account.…”

“…Miniaturized systems offer additional advantages such as the significant reduction of reagents consumption, which is becoming of major importance due to environmental concerns, and safer conditions when reactions involve the manipulation of hazardous reagents. In recent years, microfluidic systems have been increasingly used for synthetic purposes due to the advantages that they confer and the evolution that they have suffered from simple basic devices to more complex systems [10,[13][14]. These systems not only can be directly attached to pre-treatment steps or analytical instruments (such as chromatographs or spectrophotometers) but also can integrate some of them, even monolithically [15][16].…”

“…Some studies reveal that the high surface area to volume ratio of microreactors improves mass and heat transfer, giving nearly gradientless conditions, which are desirable for the determination of reaction kinetics [17][18]. This allows carrying out reactions under more precisely controlled conditions than those provided by conventional macroscale reactors [10,19], leading to improved purity and yield of the desired products and minimizing the need of performing collateral reactions and the formation of undesirable by-products [20][21][22][23][24]. Moreover, microfluidics represents a better option than conventional methodologies for the synthesis of compounds that require an inert atmosphere, since the environment can be completely controlled in a simple way inside the microfluidic channels.…”

A High‐Throughput Platform for Formulating and Screening Multifunctional Nanoparticles Capable of Simultaneous Delivery of Genes and Transcription Factors

“…Combining integrated microfluidic technologies [16][17][18][19][20][21][22][23][24][25] with a supramolecular synthetic strategy, [15,[26][27][28][29][30] we demonstrate herein a high-throughput approach for formulating and screening multifunctional supramolecular nanoparticles (MFSNPs) that are capable of simultaneous delivery of gene and functional proteins with superb efficiency and controllable stoichiometry among individual payloads ( Figure 1). As illustrated in Figure 1a, this approach utilized two microfluidic systems including a digital droplet generator (DDG; Supporting Information, Section 1.2-1.5, video available in Supporting Information) [20,22] and a microfluidic cell culture array [31,32] .…”