ERCAD: A Parametric Reactor Design Tool That Enables Rapid Prototyping and Optimization of Electrochemical Reactors through 3D Printing

Abstract

The reactors are an essential component of electrosynthetic reactions. As the electron transfer processes are heterogeneous, the reactors have a significant impact on reaction outcomes. This has resulted in reaction reproducibility being problematic, which commercial reactors alleviate somewhat but are expensive and cannot be optimized or iterated upon. Using 3D printing, rapid prototyping of bespoke reactors should facilitate investigation of the sensitivity of key reactor parameters, enable reactor optimization, and improved reproducibility through sharing of the print files. However, the bottleneck to this approach is the Computer Aided Design (CAD) of the reactors, which typically requires specialist knowledge and training to do. This has resulted in 3D printing not being typically used in the field of electrosynthesis. Herein, we showcase the development and application of a user-friendly, open-source software tool that can be used to produce Electrochemical Reactor CAD (ERCAD) designs simply and easily by nonexperts. We demonstrate its use to design and print reactors for the analysis, optimization, screening, and scaleup of electrosynthetic reactions. Using this parametric design tool, chemists with no design experience or skills can now easily create, print, test, and share their reactors.