In a collaborative teaching exchange with the University of Strasbourg, we teamed up with Prof. Gilles Marcou to design an affordable, programmable and interactive photochemical flow reactor for undergraduate teaching labs.
Flow chemistry is highly interactive for didactics, but the cost of commercial flow reactors (10s of k EUR) is prohibitive for most teaching laboratories, especially in public Universities. Moreover, it is of increasing importance to train chemistry students in reactor interaction (coding, automation) to prepare them with skills needed by industry in the future. As such, we designed a teaching exercise in which students build a photo-flow reactor using tubing/LED/dewar, and a peristaltic pump that is programmed by an Arduino chipset. It gives students practical experience in assembling the chipset, writing the program, assembling the reactor, and preparing/processing the wet chemical reaction all in a 2-3 h time slot of a typical teaching lab. Reactions flow bulb-to-bulb in a closed(safe) system, where students can flip the pump gear to reverse and continue the reaction if not completed, without risking further exposure. We tested the lab exercise on a class of ~30 students at Strasbourg, and with local students at Regensburg.
All parts for the reactor, supplier info and code to program Arduino are available in the SI file. We feel this contribution might prove a useful, low-entry barrier for University Chemistry departments to introduce their students to flow chemistry.Congratulations to Michal! It was a pleasure for JPB to collaborate with Gilles.
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