Abstract

Digital Flow Chemistry for Natural Product Synthesis

Francois Xavier Felpin, Professor, University of Nantes

Chemical laboratories 4.0 will massively use automated reactors equipped with digital interfaces, camera and robots to assist chemists in the decision-making process. In this frame, we developed a reconfigurable flow platform for either reagent screening and self-optimization, controlled via MATLAB^®. The reaction monitoring uses either on-line high pressure liquid chromatography (HPLC) or in-line benchtop nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) spectroscopy. The custom-made optimization algorithm derived from the Nelder-Mead and golden section search methods performs constrained optimizations of black-box functions in a multi-dimensional search domain. This autonomous system allowed fast and efficient optimizations of various chemical reactions including metal-catalyzed transformations and even multi-step sequences.