Open Collections

Guy, Mason

University of British Columbia

Molecular synthesis is fundamental to many scientific fields. New molecules must first be synthesized before they can be studied. Developing and optimizing synthetic procedures for these materials is a complicated and laborious task that necessitates the time and effort of skilled synthetic chemists. While only minimal material is required for initial screening, once high value targets are identified they must be continuously synthesized on scale for further testing. This continuous synthesis remains the responsibility of the synthetic chemists, dividing their expertise between cutting-edge scientific discoveries and the routine, repetitive syntheses necessary to feed such advancements. Automating repetitive, but necessary, reactions enables more time to be focused on new and innovative research. This thesis highlights the use of automation in three case studies to perform these repetitive, but necessary, reactions. The first study details our collaboration with the Cronin group at the University of Glasgow to explore the strengths of using a hardware agnostic programming language to share automated synthetic procedures between labs and across robotic platforms. This chapter also discusses our integration of online reaction monitoring into these hardware agnostic workflows to further automate expert decision making during organic syntheses. The second study discusses the development and optimization of a custom platform for the automated production of an unstable aryldiazomethane intermediate in the synthesis of a widely utilized olefin metathesis catalyst. This chapter highlights the value of online reaction monitoring in this optimization and the value in reduced manual handling of unstable intermediates in complex syntheses. The final study presents the partial automation and scale up of a multistep synthesis for a valuable ligand precursor requested by collaborators at the University of Bergen. The automated syntheses are executed on commercially available, industry standard batch-reactor equipment. The individual synthetic steps are captured in six, highly detailed tech-transfer protocols that contain relevant analytical data and decision making metrics to make adoption of these protocols by others as seamless as possible.

Text

2025-05-08

Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International

http://hdl.handle.net/2429/91066

Chemistry

University of British Columbia

UBCV

http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/