Homegrown labware made with 3D printer
Parijata D. Mackey
http://www.nature.com/news/homegrown-labware-made-with-3d-printer-1.10453)
doi:10.1038/nature.2012.10453
Armed with a three-dimensional (3D) printer and the type of
silicone-based sealant typically used for bathrooms, researchers have
demonstrated a novel way to control chemical reactions: by making the
reaction vessel an integral part of the experiment itself. The
results, published 15 April in Nature Chemistry1, could open the door
to a new generation of custom labware made to suit individual
researchers’ needs.
Led by Leroy Cronin, a chemist at the University of Glasgow in
Scotland, the researchers took advantage of 3D printing — a
computer-guided process that builds up solid objects layer by layer —
to cast a variety of reaction vessels from the quick-setting bathroom
sealant. One vessel was printed with catalyst-laced 'ink', enabling
the container walls to drive chemical reactions. Another container
included built-in electrodes, made from skinny strips of polymer
printed with a conductive carbon-based additive. The strips carried
currents that stimulated an electrochemical reaction within the
vessel.
“Chemistry, for the last 200 years, has been done in a fixed, passive
reactor,” says Cronin, referring to the conventional glass flasks and
other vessels that are standard issue in most chemistry labs. “That
has just changed.”
Using the new labware — which they call “reactionware” — the group
synthesized three novel compounds: two inorganic solids and one
organic fluid.
The researchers also printed containers customized with holes and
slots into which could be added extra hardware, such as glass viewing
windows, fibre-optic cables or electrodes for monitoring and
controlling chemical reactions. Integrated fibre optics helped the
researchers analyse a solution’s changing colour inside the vessel
without decanting the product.
In each experiment, scientists used a needle to pierce the reaction
vessel and draw reagents from separate wells into a mixing chamber.
Vessels made from bathroom sealant spontaneously re-seal around the
puncture sites after use. The researchers also sliced through some of
the containers they made to recover solid reaction products, then
glued the two halves together for subsequent experiments.
According to Cronin, the 3D printer used for the work cost US$2,000,
and the bathroom sealant is available at hardware stores. He and his
colleagues designed the vessels and controlled the printer using free,
open-source software. Cronin says that the system will allow
scientists to test chemical processes in ways that might not have been
economical before, such as producing just a few tablets of a
particular drug.
Fruit-bearing frustration
The idea emerged when Cronin was working with microfluidic devices to
draw reagents from one reaction chamber to another in controlled
patterns. Finding the equipment he was working with frustratingly hard
to modify, Cronin teamed up with Turlif Vilbrandt, a study co-author
and co-founder of Uformia, a company based in Furuflaten, Norway, that
makes modelling software for 3D printing. Cronin realized the
technology could produce rapidly re-configurable labware, including
chemically enhanced vessels.
“A lot of chemists will be thinking about what they can do with this
system that is very cheap and also versatile,” says Zhenan Bao, an
organic chemist at Stanford University in California. Bao sees
potential for the technology to speed up experimental design and
troubleshooting. Instead of testing different reaction conditions one
after another, researchers could integerate tiny, custom-printed
labware with monitors to test many conditions in parallel with only
small volumes of reagents.
Given the already-low cost of the glassware used for many standard
reactions, it may take some time for the research community to realize
the new labware’s potential, says Bartosz Grzybowski, a physical
chemist at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois. But, he
notes, “chemistry is not only the reaction but also the technology to
enable to reaction. We should be, as a discipline, a little bit more
open-minded.” Grzybowski says that humanitarian or military missions
could also use the system to print ad hoc lab equipment for portable
drug synthesis.
In the distant future, Cronin envisions that researchers and perhaps
even ordinary consumers could download 3D printing programs similar to
smart-phone applications. Such applications might instruct the printer
to create a vessel that has a pre-programmed and fully tested chemical
reaction built in.
Bao notes that the polymer used would not be appropriate for all
chemical reactions or for use at high temperatures. Cronin says the
team is testing different ink materials to find out whether they are
more resistant to heat and caustic conditions than bathroom sealant.
“It’s not as hardy as steel or glass, but I think the flexibility that
you get is a game-changer,” says Cronin.
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Integrated 3D-printed reactionware for chemical synthesis and analysis
(Source: http://www.nature.com/nchem/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/nchem.1313.html)
doi:10.1038/nchem.1313
Three-dimensional (3D) printing has the potential to transform science
and technology by creating bespoke, low-cost appliances that
previously required dedicated facilities to make. An attractive, but
unexplored, application is to use a 3D printer to initiate chemical
reactions by printing the reagents directly into a 3D reactionware
matrix, and so put reactionware design, construction and operation
under digital control. Here, using a low-cost 3D printer and
open-source design software we produced reactionware for organic and
inorganic synthesis, which included printed-in catalysts and other
architectures with printed-in components for electrochemical and
spectroscopic analysis. This enabled reactions to be monitored in situ
so that different reactionware architectures could be screened for
their efficacy for a given process, with a digital feedback mechanism
for device optimization. Furthermore, solely by modifying reactionware
architecture, reaction outcomes can be altered. Taken together, this
approach constitutes a relatively cheap, automated and reconfigurable
chemical discovery platform that makes techniques from chemical
engineering accessible to typical synthetic laboratories.
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