Academic CentreSustainable chemistry
Targeted solvent design
Ionic liquids (ILs) are salts that melt at relatively low temperatures, often below 0 °C. Being ionic compounds, they are extremely non-volatile, but still fluid. Estimates suggest around one million of distinct ionic liquids can be obtained by combining various cations and anions. This paves the way for designing liquids that can serve a particular function, e.g., as solvents for certain type of organic transformations or as electrolytes for power storage and conversion.
In our lab, we combine the expertise on high quality custom-ionic liquid synthesis with a targeted structural IL advancement for enabling these unique materials to improve chemical processes' efficiency and sustainability. Our research is focused on understanding the underlying design principles for ionic liquids that would contribute to reaching the said goals by, e.g., improving the energy consumption of chemicals’ synthesis, improving the energy consumption of gas mixture separation, reducing the use of organic solvents, which are volatile organic compounds (VOCs), ensuring a non-flammable media for chemical transformations.
Continuous flow electrochemistry and asymmetric organocatalytic transformations in flow.
Flow chemistry involves conducting reactions in the continuous flow of the reagents or their solution. Main advantages of the flow chemistry as compared to the batch reaction mode are enhanced safety, improved heat transfer and better temperature control, accelerated reaction rates, improved selectivity and great potential for manufacturing scale-out. Furthermore, the use of small reaction mixture volumes in flow chemistry enables the efficient identification of optimal parameters for a given chemical transformation. This streamlined process significantly reduces the amount of starting materials required, allowing for faster experimentation and discovery of ideal reaction conditions.
Our research is focused on continuous flow electrochemistry and the development of asymmetric organocatalytic transformations in flow.