Abstract:

While much has been achieved in the field of colloidal nanoparticle chemistry over the past 40 years, the vast majority of work has been performed in low throughput, low yield batch reactions that result in milligrams to multiple grams of product at most. As industrial demand for colloidal nanoparticles increases, there is a growing need to scale up these batch chemistries in easy, safe, and sustainable ways. This talk highlights our work on using continuous flow reactors for the scalable manufacture of colloidal nanoparticles. Flow reactors offer advantages over conventional batch reactors with respect to running continuously, offering superior reproducibility and reaction control, being automatable, and presenting environmental health and safety benefits by operating on demand. I will present our contributions to this area with respect to using sustainable solvents, trapping kinetic nanoparticle morphologies, and designing new modes of reactor parallelization. I will then highlight new developments on synthetically challenging transition metal carbide nanoparticle catalysts. I will focus on recent results using data-driven statistical design of experiments (DoE) methods to expeditiously maximize manufacturing throughput of MoC1–x nanoparticle catalysts using a multivariate screening of the parameter space, followed by response surface methodology to find the optimal response.