A software platform for the computer vision-enabled analysis of mixing phenomena of relevance to process scale-up is described. By bringing new and known time-resolved mixing metrics under one platform, hitherto unavailable comparisons of pixelderived mixing metrics are exemplified across non-chemical and chemical processes. The analytical methods described are applicable using any camera and across an appreciable range of reactor scales, from development through to process scale-up. A case study in nucleophilic aromatic substitution run on a 5 L scale in a stirred tank reactor shows how camera and offline concentration analyses can be correlated. In some cases, it can be shown that camera data hold the power to predict reaction progress.

We report a computer vision strategy for the extraction and colorimetric analysis of catalyst degradation and product formation kinetics from video footage. The degradation of palladium(II) pre-catalyst systems to form ‘Pd black’ is investigated as a widely relevant case study for catalysis and materials chemistries. Beyond the study of catalysts in isolation, investigation of Pd-catalyzed Miyaura borylation reactions revealed informative correlations between colour parameters (most notably ΔE, a colour-agnostic measure of contrast change) and the concentration of product measured by off-line analysis (NMR and LC-MS). The breakdown of such correlations helped inform conditions under which reaction vessels were compromised by air ingress. These findings present opportunities to expand the toolbox of non-invasive analytical techniques, operationally cheaper and simpler to implement than common spectroscopic methods. The approach introduces the capability of analyzing the macroscopic ‘bulk’ for the study of reaction kinetics in complex mixtures, in complement to the more common study of microscopic and molecular specifics.

Non-contact computer vision complements traditional offline sampling methods for catalytic reaction monitoring.

Trialkylammonium (most notably N,N,N-trimethylanilinium) salts are known to display dual reactivity through both the aryl group and the N-methyl groups. These salts have thus been widely applied in cross-coupling, aryl...