Microreactor Technology: Identifying Focus Fields and Emerging Trends by Using CiteSpace II

Abstract

Microreactors have gained widespread attention from academia and industrial researchers due to their exceptionally fast mass and heat transfer and flexible control. In this work, CiteSpace software was used to systematically analyze the relevant literature to gain a comprehensively understand on the research status of microreactors in various fields. The results show that the research depth and application scope of microreactors are continuing to expand. The top 10 most popular research fields are photochemistry, pharmaceutical intermediates, multistep flow synthesis, mass transfer, computational fluid dynamics, μ-TAS (micro total analysis system), nanoparticles, biocatalysis, hydrogen production, and solid-supported reagents. The evolution trends of current focus areas are examined, including photochemistry, mass transfer, biocatalysis and hydrogen production and their milestone literature is analyzed in detail. This article demonstrates the development of different fields of microreactors technology and highlights the unending opportunities and challenges offered by this fascinating technology.

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“…Continuous-flow technology is often coupled with photochemistry and photocatalysis in synthetic campaigns, making it arguably the most popular application of flow chemistry. [54][55][56][57][58][59] Light absorption is governed by the Beer-Lambert law, leading to a rapid decline of the light intensity when travelling through a reaction mixture that contains photon-absorbing molecules. Consequently, the center of the reactor receives almost no light, creating a "dark zone" where there is no reaction occurring.…”

Development of an automated platform for monitoring microfluidic reactors through multi-reactor integration and online (chip-)LC/MS-detection

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