Process Analytical Technology (PAT) Approaches for Continuous Flow Chemistry

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The ability to monitor, control and maintain the quality in process chemistry, is key to all chemical industry. Whilst historically chemical processes have been performed prevently in batch, recent trends have moved towards continuous flow chemistry, due to its safer and higher efficiency for synthesis. Recently, Process Analytical Technology (PAT) has been developed to allow for process monitoring to be performed both in-situ and in real time. This strategy offers a greater amount of detailed information, as the data is acquired under reaction conditions. All species within the reaction can be observed, providing mechanistic insights, via the study of intermediates formed in the process. Benefits are further seen in the ability to view a system in real time. This allows for impurities to be detected during the reaction, allowing for optimal reaction conditions to be identified by minimising impurity formation. The combination of new PAT and self-optimisation algorithms will lead to faster optimisation and more sustainable processes; featuring shorter reaction times, higher quality products, as well as less waste being produced. The aim of this project is to combine flow chemistry with PAT techniques, to increase the efficiency of chemical synthesis. We will use several different PAT approaches, and combine these with self-optimisation, to reduce the time needed for process development using steady state and time-resolved spectroscopy. Many organic reactions, particularly photochemical ones, involve a sequence of elemental processes spanning a very wide range of timescales from picoseconds up to many seconds. The ability to apply PAT across these timescales would lead to a very powerful means of optimisation tool. Thus, we plan to apply Time Resolved spectroscopies for process monitoring of the transient species involved in photoredox and other reactions to give mechanistic insight, thereby facilitating reaction optimisation and scale up.