Abstract

Visible-Light-Driven Fine Chemical Synthesis Using Inexpensive Natural Gases as Feedstocks in Micro-Tubing Reactors

Wu Jie, Assistant Professor, Chemistry Department, National University of Singapore

Natural gases such as CO2, ethylene, acetylene, methane, ethane are inexpensive and available in virtually unlimited amounts, making them appealing candidates as C1 and C2 feedstocks for sustainable chemical synthesis. However, any attempt at using natural gases as raw materials in synthetic endeavors has to cope with serious challenges, including the inert reactivity and difficulty of operation. Photocatalysis has witnessed dramatic developments over the past decade which provides enormous opportunities for new catalytic synthetic methodology development using natural gases. In conventional batch reactors, scalability of photo-reactions is hampered due to the attenuation effect of photon transport, which prevents the use of a dimension-enlarging strategy for scale-up. The use of continuous-flow micro-tubing reactors for photochemical applications allows these issues to be overcome, by ensuring uniform irradiation of the entire reaction mixture and scaling-up of photochemical reactions via scaling-out or numbering-up strategies. In this context, my research group at NUS has invented a “stop-flow” micro-tubing (SFMT) reactor platform, which represents an ideal laboratory bench model for reaction discover applications. Assisted by SFMT reactors, we developed methodologies to convert acetylene, CO2, ethylene, and ethane into fine chemicals. Gram-scale synthesis can be easily achieved by the SFMT reactors, and the reaction can be further scale-up by using continuous-flow technology.