Engineering polymeric hollow fiber membrane reactors for sustainable chemical transformation reactions
“Over the past decade, laboratory-scale continuous-flow processes have witnessed explosive developments and have attracted a great deal of interest with respect to the significance of the economic and environmentally-sustainable production of pharmaceuticals, fine chemicals, and agrochemicals, as well as upgrading of biomass feedstocks. Immobilization of organocatalysts and metal nanoparticles on continuous-flow microreactors offers an efficient catalytic system that exploits and enhances the advantages of both nanocatalysis and flow chemistry, the so-called flow nanocatalysis approach. Various approaches have been developed for the development of continuous-flow reactions including immobilization and subsequent anchoring of organocatalysts and metal nanoparticles within microfluidic reactors. However, many applications of microfluidic reactor-supported catalysts are still hampered by catalysts decomposition and their subsequent leaching from the microfluidic reactor to the product stream. This dissertation focuses on the investigation of structure/property/performance relations of a new catalytic membrane reactor platform for conducting catalytic reactions in a continuous-flow fashion. More specifically, it focuses on permanent immobilization/impregnation of organic or metal nanoparticle catalysts by covalent bonding within highly swelling-resistant asymmetric polymeric hollow fiber surfaces for non-leaching catalysis. This novel hollow fiber membrane reactor was used as a heterogeneous catalyst and continuous-flow reactor for various reactions including aldol and nitroaldol condensation, Heck coupling, tandem reaction of glucose and fructose to 5-hydroxymethylfurfural, and nitrophenol reduction reactions”--Abstract, page iv.
Continuous-flow processes, Flow Chemistry, Heterogeneous catalyst, Hollow fiber membrane reactor, Chemical Engineering
Missouri University of Science and Technology
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