Abstract

Microfluidic Factories for Advanced Functional Materials

Saif Khan, Associate Professor, Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering, National University of Singapore

Microfluidics is a tremendously promising technology for chemical and materials synthesis due to the inherent, remarkable level of control of physical transport phenomena and their interactions with chemical reactions. In this talk I will discuss the design and development of microfluidic methods for the exquisitely controlled synthesis of nano- and micro-structured functional materials. To showcase wide-ranging applicability of this technology, I will deliberately focus on two very different materials classes – metal-based nanoparticles with tunable plasmonic properties and organic microcrystals relevant for pharmaceutical drug formulations. In the former case, I will demonstrate how microfluidics enables short contact-time (1-5 s) gas-liquid flow chemistry in ways that are simply not possible using macroscale techniques. In the latter, I will show how simple capillary-based microfluidics can potentially revolutionize the manufacture and formulation of pharmaceutical active drugs by enabling the sustainable and scalable fabrication of the most controlled spherical (organic) microcrystal agglomerates ever reported.