(515a) Development of a Flow Platform for Autonomous Model-Based Experimental Design

Currently, the development and optimization of flow processes is seen as a resource intensive and specialized activity within the high-value chemical manufacturing sector when compared to batch processes. Next generation technologies and data are underutilized within these sectors, therefore resulting in unnecessarily long process development times and suboptimal production processes which delivers lower quality product. In this talk, we describe the development of an in-house built optimization and modeling software, which enables researchers to perform sequential experimental design (Fig 1a). The platform facilitates the automation of the flow experiments, collection of data in real-time, and is able to autonomously perform the model fitting in an iterative fashion, with no manual intervention necessary (Fig. 1b).

We highlight the application of the software to optimize a four-dimensional nucleophilic aromatic substitution and a six-dimensional photochemical benzylic bromination. The modular flow platform is coupled with ¹H benchtop NMR for real-time analysis. This talk will demonstrate that the software is easy to implement and flexible to the development constraints, and will thus facilitate early use of models for the identification of the sensitivity of product quality to parameter changes, significantly reducing development time and risks.