Three-dimensional (3D) printing has the potential to transform science and technology by creating bespoke, low-cost appliances that previously required dedicated facilities to make. An attractive, but unexplored, application is to use a 3D printer to initiate chemical reactions by printing the reagents directly into a 3D reactionware matrix, and so put reactionware design, construction and operation under digital control. Here, using a low-cost 3D printer and open-source design software we produced reactionware for organic and inorganic synthesis, which included printed-in catalysts and other architectures with printed-in components for electrochemical and spectroscopic analysis. This enabled reactions to be monitored in situ so that different reactionware architectures could be screened for their efficacy for a given process, with a digital feedback mechanism for device optimization. Furthermore, solely by modifying reactionware architecture, reaction outcomes can be altered. Taken together, this approach constitutes a relatively cheap, automated and reconfigurable chemical discovery platform that makes techniques from chemical engineering accessible to typical synthetic laboratories. © 2012 Macmillan Publishers Limited. All rights reserved.
CITATION STYLE
Symes, M. D., Kitson, P. J., Yan, J., Richmond, C. J., Cooper, G. J. T., Bowman, R. W., … Cronin, L. (2012). Integrated 3D-printed reactionware for chemical synthesis and analysis. Nature Chemistry, 4(5), 349–354. https://doi.org/10.1038/nchem.1313
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