Accelerated Electrosynthesis Development Enabled by High-Throughput Experimentation

Abstract

Electrochemical synthesis has recently emerged as an environmentally benign method for synthesizing value-added fine chemicals. Its unique reactivity has attracted significant interests of synthetic chemists to develop new redox chemistries. However, compared to conventional chemistry, the increased complexity caused by electrode materials, supporting electrolytes, and setup configurations create obstacles for efficient reaction discovery and optimization. The recent increasing adoption of high-throughput experimentation (HTE) in synthetic chemistry significantly expedites the synthesis development. Considering the potential of implementing HTE in electrosynthesis to tackle the challenges of increased parameter space, this short review aims at providing recent advances in the HTE technology for electrosynthesis, including electrocatalysts screening, device miniaturization, electroanalytical methods, artificial intelligence, and system integration. The discussed contents also cover some topics in HTE electrochemistry for areas other than synthetic chemistry, hoping to spark some inspirations for readers to use interdisciplinary techniques to solve challenges in synthetic electrochemistry.

Wireless Electrochemical Reactor for Accelerated Exploratory Study of Electroorganic Synthesis

“…Compared to thermal chemistry and photochemistry, complications caused by electrode insertion, wire connection, reactor sealing, and high-cost potentiostats impede the development of automated electrosynthesis platform. 39 The Wi-eChem system developed in this work allows conducting electrochemistry with significantly reduced operation complexity, enabling its facile integration into a common automated synthesis workflow. Thus, we constructed a fully automated robotic electrosynthesis platform with four-channel parallelized Wi-eChem devices (Figure 5a).…”