| Sumario: | Like boys and girls at a school dance, molecules in solution take a long time to get together. That, plus other attributes related to the way things work in miniature, are spurring the development of microreactors--a technology that exploits the advantages of the small-scale approach to doing better chemistry. Fitting reactions that are normally done in a test tube into channels that are only 10 to 300 microns wide--roughly the diameter of a plant spore--makes moving things around extremely easy, says Andrew de Mello, a chemist at Imperial College, London, England. Similarly, the ease with which heat can be got into and out of a system permits even potentially explosive reactions to be done safely. In partnership with the Swiss chemical manufacturer, Clariant, Cellular Process Chemistry Systems of Frankfurt, Germany, engineered a three-step synthesis of pigments using a microreactor system called Cytos. GlaxoSmithKline, a British pharmaceutical company, is evaluating three separate microreactors, including the Cytos system, to improve ways of finding new drugs. At the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory in Richland, a town in the state of Washington, Robert Wegeng and his colleagues are focusing mostly on energy applications of microreactors--including hydrogen producers for fuel cells, and tiny heating and cooling systems.
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