Understanding and controlling mass transport spanning across multiple phases and drastically different length scales can enable process intensification in chemical processes toward accelerated discovery, optimization, and manufacturing of specialty/fine chemicals. Our lab mission statement is to study flow chemistry strategies tailored toward addressing the most pervasive challenge of the modern world: Meeting a rapidly growing global energy demand while preserving the environment. To meet these goals, we study the fundamentals of process intensification and microscale transport phenomena using microreaction engineering concepts and principles of “smart” manufacturing. Our interdisciplinary research group aims to develop the science base and understanding to enable the use of modular, intensified flow reactors for autonomous parameter space exploration and optimization of solution-phase chemical processes.

 

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Current research thrusts in our group include (I) autonomous synthesis and manufacturing of solution-processed materials in flow; (II) flow synthesis of catalyst scaffolds (microparticles) with tunable size and morphologies for continuous green manufacturing of fine chemicals; and (III) accelerated fundamental and applied studies of gas-liquid reactions (e.g., CO2-triggered switchable solvent recovery, hydroformylation, carbonylation) enabled by microreaction engineering in flow.