Sustainable Scale-Up of Nanoparticle Manufacturing Using Microreactors

由贵金属(金、银、铂等)制成的纳米颗粒可用于生物医学治疗、能源生产和提高化学反应效率。然而，目前制造这些纳米粒子的技术依赖于缓慢而昂贵的实验室规模的化学反应，这使得金属纳米粒子的最有希望的应用成本高昂。在实验室中进行的小批量反应保证了高质量和均匀的颗粒。如果反应体积增加到工业规模，这种质量和均匀性将会丧失。该奖项支持开发用于产生纳米颗粒的微流控化学反应器的研究。微流控化学反应器在直径小于一毫米的通道中处理非常少量的化学物质。由于它们的体积很小，它们可以生产出与目前使用的实验室规模反应相同的质量和一致性的纳米颗粒。该奖项支持的这项研究的目标是了解如何同时操作许多微流控反应器，使大量纳米颗粒能够以自动化、连续的方式生产，同时保持这些颗粒的质量。这里开发的技术将促进高效和可持续的工业规模生产金属纳米颗粒。该项目将与一项教育推广计划相结合，该计划将高中生和社区大学生作为研究的积极参与者。虽然在微反应器中进行纳米制造是一项成熟的技术，但要使其成为可持续的工业规模过程，还需要克服几个挑战。这项研究将实现四个目标来克服这些挑战。(1)发展可持续的离子液体化学以制备铂和Rh纳米粒子。(2)最大限度提高液滴流量的微流控表面涂层设计。(3)实施新的液滴合并技术，以促进多步骤(例如，种子生长)纳米颗粒制备反应。(4)高度并行化的微反应器系统的反馈控制，以促进工业规模的产量。该奖项将促进不同研究领域的交叉知识，促进化学、化学工程和微制造技术的应用，以开发在连续流动微反应器中扩大纳米颗粒制造的基本原理。它将导致开发出广泛适用的方案，用于合理组装和控制大规模并行微流控反应器，以及在这些系统中执行可持续化学的技术。目标是以科学为基础设计工业规模、可持续的微反应堆制造系统。

Nanoparticles made of precious metals (gold, silver, platinum, etc.) are useful for biomedical therapies, energy generation, and improving the efficiency of chemical reactions. Current techniques for manufacturing these nanoparticles, however, rely on slow and costly laboratory-scale chemical reactions, making metal nanoparticles cost-prohibitive for their most promising applications. Reactions performed in small batches in the lab guarantee high particle quality and uniformity. This quality and uniformity would be lost if the reaction volumes were increased to the industrial scale. This award supports research in the development of microfluidic chemical reactors for generating nanoparticles. Microfluidic chemical reactors handle very small volumes of chemicals in channels that are smaller than a millimeter across. Because of their small size, they can produce nanoparticles with the same quality and uniformity as the laboratory-scale reactions currently used. The goal of the research supported by this award is to understand how to operate many microfluidic reactors simultaneously, allowing for large quantities of nanoparticles to be produced in an automated, continuous manner while maintaining the quality of these particles. The technology developed here will facilitate the efficient and sustainable industrial-scale production of metal nanoparticles. This project will be integrated with an educational outreach program that incorporates high school and community college students as active participants in the research.While nanofabrication in microreactors is an established technology, there are several challenges that need to be overcome to make it a sustainable industrial-scale process. This research will accomplish four objectives to overcome these challenges. (1) Development of sustainable ionic-liquid based chemistry for the fabrication of Pt and Rh nanoparticles. (2) Design of microfluidic surface coatings for maximized throughput of droplet flows. (3) Implementation of new droplet merger techniques to facilitate multistep (e.g., seeded growth) nanoparticle fabrication reactions. (4) Feedback control of highly parallelized systems of microreactors to facilitate industrial-scale yields. This award will advance knowledge at the intersection of diverse fields of study, facilitating the application of techniques from chemistry, chemical engineering, and microfabrication technology to develop fundamental principles for the scale up of nanoparticle manufacturing in continuous-flow microreactors. It will lead to the development of broadly adaptable schemes for the rational assembly and control of massively parallel microfluidic reactors and techniques for performing sustainable chemistry in these systems. The goal is a science-based approach to the design of industrial-scale, sustainable microreactor manufacturing systems.