Design and implementation of an automated reconfigurable modular flow chemistry synthesis platform

Synthetic chemistry has been the driving force behind advances in pharmaceuticals, agricultural chemicals to advanced materials; however, these fields have struggled with a slow pace of discovery, limited reproducibility, and difficulty scaling promising new molecules. Current organic chemistry labs rely on batch methodologies limiting the safe process windows, contributing to scaling difficulties, and causing reproducibility issues. Advances in laboratory automation and flow chemistry can be combined to address this bottleneck while increasing expert chemists' productivity. Automated reaction platforms, however, have been limited in their ability to access a diverse set of process units, beyond simple mixing and stirring. A system capable of carrying out multi-step syntheses, inline reaction monitoring, multi-phase reactions, and is easily reconfigurable could enable access to novel process windows and enhance laboratory productivity.

Name thesis:degree_name

Doctoral

Department dc:contributor.department

Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Mechanical Engineering

Grantor dc:publisher

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Year dc:date.issued

2019

Author dc:creator

• Thomas, Dale Arlington,III.

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• Anastasios John Hart.

• Mechanical Engineering.

Statement dc:rights

• MIT theses are protected by copyright. They may be viewed, downloaded, or printed from this source but further reproduction or distribution in any format is prohibited without written permission.

Licence dc:rights.uri

• http://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/7582

Language dc:language.iso

eng

Handle dc:identifier.uri

https://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/121851

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:dspace.mit.edu:1721.1/121851