Nanoscale reactors

A. de Mello, J. de Mello, Microscale reactors nanoscale products. Lab Chip 4, IIN (2004)... 

Micelles have internal cavities of the order of 1-3 nm diameter, which allow them to act as nanoscale photochemical reactors for incarcerated guest molecules. Photons absorbed by the guest provide the necessary activation to break covalent bonds in the guest molecule, while the resulting reaction intermediates are themselves constrained to remain in the micelle cavity. 

Eggeling, E.B., Hovestad, N.J., Jastrzebski, J.T.B.H., Vogt, D. and van Koten, G. (2000) Phosphino carboxylic acid ester functionalized carbosilane dendrimers nanoscale ligands for the Pd-catalyzed hydrovinylation reaction in a membrane reactor. J. Org. Chem., 65, 8857. 

Diffusion as an Efficient Means of Transport in Micro- and Nanoscale Chemical Reactors fesT—Driven Fluidic Devices... 

Diffusion is an efficient means of materials transport in natural and artificial nanoscale systems and can be readily employed in the study of enzymatic reactions in fluid membrane reactors of static or of changing geometries and morphologies. Other means of transport, e.g. electrophoretic or tension-driven modes are also available. 

J.W. Cooper, J. Chen, Y. Li, and C.S. Lee, Membrane-based nanoscale proteolytic reactor enabling protein digestion, peptide separation, and protein identification using AdS, Anal. Chem., 75 (2003) 1067. 

The giant wheel molyhdenum-oxide based anions can be considered as objects which show a variety of nanoscale structural functionalities ( nanostructured landscape ) not only allowing reactions at a variety of well-defined centres/groups but also offering the option of acting as potential nano-reactors or -containers. Some relevant reactions are ... 

Although these results are preliminary, they demonstrate the feasibility of the concept of photocatalytic microstructured reactors, and their potential to increase by various orders of magnitude the catalyst coated surface per reaction liquid volume [124[. A critical problem to solve is the maximization of the illumination efficiency. The availability of a multitude of low-intensity light emitting sources on the micro- or even nanoscale near the catalyst particles appears to be a novel and promising approach to achieve uniform and maximized illumination. Combination of the latter approach with equipment to overcome the mass transfer limitations may prove to be the significant improvement that photoreactors need for industrial implementation. 

Shchukin, D. G., Sukhorukov, G. B., Nanoparticle synthesis in engineered organic nanoscale reactors, Adv. Mater., 16(8), 2004, 671-682. 

Chapter 16 Reactor Design at Meso-, Micro-, and Nanoscales... 

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