Flow Reactor for Sustainable Production of Hypercrosslinked Polymers

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Hypercrosslinked polymers (HCPs) is a promising class of polymers that has potential use in many applications, such as adsorption, chromatography and catalysis, due to their excellent porosity properties and outstanding thermal stability. HCPs are already widely deployed in industrial applications to remove toxicants and reduce carbon emissions.Currently, HCPs are produced in batch, which is a time-consuming process. With increasing demand for environmental remediation as well as rising carbon prices, much larger quantities of HCPs may be required soon, potentially making the currently employed batch process insufficient. However, to increase the production of HCPs, it is possible to convert the batch production process to flow - an unusual direction that has been barely explored in research.Additionally, to ensure the competitiveness of HCPs with other microporous materials, it is important to make the process greener by reducing the amount of acidic waste. This could be done by utilising deep eutectic solvents (DES) instead of using a conventional combination of reactants - another approach that has minimal presence in literature.This project will combine these two ambitious approaches to explore the feasibility of production of HCPs in flow using DES. A flow reactor will be built and HCPs will be synthesised using DES and conventional reactants in both batch and flow. These HCPs will be characterised and compared with each other. If the flow-based HCPs are deemed successful, the reaction conditions will be changed to optimise the production process and to evaluate the reaction kinetics.