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In this report, a method based on the infrared-assisted polymerization of methyl methacrylate has been developed for the rapid fabrication of PMMA CE microchips. Methyl methacrylate containing AIBN was allowed to prepolymerize in a water bath to form a fast-curing molding solution that was subsequently sandwiched between a silicon template and a piece of 1 mm-thick PMMA plate. The images of microchannels on the silicon template were precisely replicated into the synthesized PMMA substrates during the infrared-assisted polymerization of the molding solution. The polymerization could be completed within 50 min at 50 degrees C. The obtained channel plate was subsequently bonded to a piece of PMMA cover sheet to form a microchip with the aid of heat and pressure. The new fabrication approach obviates the need for special equipment and significantly simplifies the process of fabricating PMMA microchips. The attractive performance of the obtained PMMA microchips has been demonstrated in connection with contactless conductivity detection for the separation and detection of ionic species.

In this study, nitrogen-protected microwave-assisted extraction (NPMAE), in which microwave-assisted extraction was performed under nitrogen protection, was initially developed and combined with HPLC separation for the determination of ascorbic acid (AA), an oxidizable component, from fruit and vegetables. The extraction conditions of NPMAE were investigated by extraction of AA from guava, and the chosen conditions were as follows: extraction solvent of 0.25% metaphosphoric acid solution, solid/liquid ratio of 1:10 g/mL, microwave power of 400 W and irradiation time of 10 min. Subsequently, this novel NPMAE method was evaluated by extraction of AA from different fruit and vegetables, such as guava, yellow pepper, green pepper and cayenne pepper. Compared with conventional MAE and solvent extraction methods, the oxidation of AA was significantly reduced or prevented in the process of NPMAE, providing higher extraction yield of AA. These results suggested the potential of NPMAE method for the extraction of oxidizable compounds from different spices of matrices.

A new, simple, and fast infrared-assisted self enzymolysis extraction (IRASEE) approach for the extraction of total flavonoid aglycones (TFA) mainly including baicalein, wogonin, and oroxylin A from Scutellariae Radix is presented to enhance extraction yield. Extraction enzymolysis temperature, enzymolysis liquid-to-solid ratio, enzymolysis pH, enzymolysis time and infrared power, the factors affecting IRASEE procedure, were investigated in a newly designed, temperature-controlled infrared-assisted extraction (TC-IRAE) system to acquire the optimum analysis conditions. The results illustrated that IRASEE possessed great advantages in terms of efficiency and time compared with other conventional extraction techniques. Furthermore, the mechanism of IRASEE was preliminarily explored by observing the microscopic change of the samples surface structures, studying the main chemical compositions change of the samples before and after extraction and investigating the kinetics and thermodynamics at three temperature levels during the IRASEE process. These findings revealed that IRASEE can destroy the surface microstructures to accelerate the mass transfer and reduce the activation energy to intensify the chemical process. This integrative study presents a simple, rapid, efficient, and environmental IRASEE method for TFA extraction which has promising prospects for other similar herbal medicines. Graphical Abstract ᅟ.