Factory in a Fumehood: Reagentless Flow Reactors as Enabling Techniques for Manufacture

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This proposal aims to bring together a unique team of scientists from academia and industry to develop new enabling manufacturing techniques for the reagentless synthesis of high value chemical products. Why reagentless? In traditional chemical processes once a reagent has performed its task it needs to be removed from the product stream. Unless the spent reagent can be reactivated then the waste stream must be dealt with. Most processes require large amounts of reagent, placing a heavy financial and environmental burden on manufacturing of high value products such as pharmaceuticals. The Holy Grail would be to avoid reagents altogether. Photochemisty, electrochemistry and thermochemistry are reagentless techniques, requiring only electrical energy as a primary input and will be the focus of this project in order to provide new enabling techniques for manufacturing. By the use of flow chemistry techniques these three areas can be connected together to provide rapid access to complex, high value products - this is conceptualized as a 'Factory in a Fumehood' - where scale-up can be achieved with a small footprint and with greatly reduced operating costs and waste.