Abstract
A simple flow chemistry microreactor with an electrospray ionization tip for real time mass spectrometric reaction monitoring is introduced. The microreactor was fabricated by a laser-based additive manufacturing technique from acid-resistant stainless steel 316L. The functionality of the microreactor was investigated by using an inverse electron demand Diels-Alder and subsequent retro Diels-Alder reaction for testing. Challenges and problems encountered are discussed and improvements proposed. Adsorption of reagents to the rough stainless steel channel walls, short length of the reaction channel, and making a proper ESI tip present challenges, but the microreactor is potentially useful as a disposable device.
Highlights
One of the advantages of microfluidic devices for the analysis of chemical reactions is the small amount of reagents required [1]
Examples of reaction monitoring capabilities integrated with microreactors include mass spectrometry [6], NMR spectroscopy [7], liquid chromatography [8], and UV-Vis spectroscopy [9, 10]
The most common mass spectrometric method used with microreactors has been electrospray ionization – mass spectrometry (ESI-MS), which has been done either by attaching the microreactor to a commercial ESI ion source [11, 12, 13, 14] or by integrating an ESI tip with the reactor [6, 15, 16, 17, 18]
Summary
One of the advantages of microfluidic devices for the analysis of chemical reactions is the small amount of reagents required [1]. Other advantages of microreactors compared to conventional reactors include improved temperature control due to high surface to volume ratio [2, 3], and shorter mixing times. A noteworthy benefit of ESI is that it is a relatively “soft” technique, making it capable to well preserve the studied analytes as intact molecules when ionizing them [19, 20]. This makes ESI attractive for scenarios such as reaction mechanism investigations [21], and biopolymer and synthetic polymer studies [20, 22, 23, 24, 25]
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