Scientists in Spain have shown that spray-drying equipment can be used to perform three common organic reactions. The researchers behind the work suggest that spray-drying could prove to be a faster and more sustainable alternative to traditional techniques for synthesising numerous small organic molecules at scale.
Spray-drying is widely used in the pharmaceutical and food industries, usually to make dry powders from liquids, using hot gas. Daniel Maspoch, of the Catalan Institute of Nanoscience and Nanotechnology, explains that using aerosols in synthetic organic chemistry isn’t new, but that he and his colleagues were inspired to explore the limits of such techniques by recent findings that microdroplets can speed up chemical reactions. Here, surface area is thought to play an influential role, alongside the…