Abstract
Flow chemistry is an area of contemporary chemistry exploiting the hydrodynamic conditions of flowing liquids to provide particular environments for chemical reactions. These particular conditions of enhanced and strictly regulated transport of reagents, improved interface contacts, intensification of heat transfer, and safe operation with hazardous chemicals can be utilized in chemical synthesis, both for mechanization and automation of analytical procedures, and for the investigation of the kinetics of ultrafast reactions. Such methods are developed for more than half a century. In the field of chemical synthesis, they are used mostly in pharmaceutical chemistry for efficient syntheses of small amounts of active substances. In analytical chemistry, flow measuring systems are designed for environmental applications and industrial monitoring, as well as medical and pharmaceutical analysis, providing essential enhancement of the yield of analyses and precision of analytical determinations. The main concept of this review is to show the overlapping of development trends in the design of instrumentation and various ways of the utilization of specificity of chemical operations under flow conditions, especially for synthetic and analytical purposes, with a simultaneous presentation of the still rather limited correspondence between these two main areas of flow chemistry.
Highlights
Monitoring and controlling the progress in the course of a given chemical reaction is a fundamental issue in various applications of chemical science
As indicated by the progress in different areas of chemical science achieved over the past century, one of the contributing factors in the yield of chemical reactions is the movement of reagents depending on various mechanisms
First examples of the use of the term “flow chemistry” in chemical synthesis or analytical fields were found at the turn of 1990s and 2000s in work on the pulsed generation of concentration profiles in flow analysis [5] and in the description of continuous-flow microreactors with fluid propulsion achieved by magnetohydrodynamic actuation, which was employed for the amplification of DNA through the polymerase chain reaction [6]
Summary
Monitoring and controlling the progress in the course of a given chemical reaction is a fundamental issue in various applications of chemical science. First examples of the use of the term “flow chemistry” in chemical synthesis or analytical fields were found at the turn of 1990s and 2000s in work on the pulsed generation of concentration profiles in flow analysis [5] and in the description of continuous-flow microreactors with fluid propulsion achieved by magnetohydrodynamic actuation, which was employed for the amplification of DNA through the polymerase chain reaction [6]. For instance, certain areas of measurements or studies under flow conditions are not included, for example, analytical process monitoring by dedicated industrial instrumentation or industrial processes carried out on a technological scale in flow reactors This should be mentioned in order to not restrict the term “flow chemistry” in the context of modern chemical science and, simultaneously, to point out the importance of this field. A special emphasis is focused on the presentation of the development and chronology of inventions of numerous physico-chemical operations and appropriate instrumental devices, which are widely employed in both flow synthesis and flow analysis
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