A glass microchip has been used for the first time to carry out fast carbonylative cross-coupling reactions of arylhalides to form secondary amides.

gas-liquid carbonylation on a glass-fabricated microchip

Nick Long and colleagues from Imperial College London, UK used a continuous flow microreactor to investigate the palladium-catalysed carbonylative cross-coupling reaction of arylhalides with carbon monoxide gas. Their work shows that using microfluidic reactors to carry out a series of carbonylative cross-coupling reactions provides distinct advantages in yield and reaction time compared to conventional methods.

Microstructured devices, or microfluidic reactors, show many advantages over traditional laboratory techniques. Improvements in mass and heat transfer provided by microfluidic reactors can have a significant effect on the rate, yield, selectivity and control of reactions. This is especially useful in preparation of organic molecules for high throughput chemistry, catalyst testing or the synthesis of radiopharmaceuticals where there is great emphasis on the speed of production.

Nick Long, head of the research group at Imperial said 'The future development of this work could lead to our devices being applied to high throughput synthesis or catalyst screening where reactions could be performed and analysed in seconds or minutes rather than hours.'

Sarah Dixon