Liquid-Assisted Grinding - from Fundaments to Applications

Liquid-assisted grinding (LAG) is a mechanochemical process in which a catalytic amount of added liquid tremendously accelerate the reaction kinetics, and often significantly alter reaction outcome.

Due to high applicability potential of LAG and still a huge amount of ambiguities, it has become essential to improve understanding of reaction mechanisms at molecular level.

Establishing a correspondence between solution and solid-state reaction mechanisms would enable utilisation of huge body of knowledge in the currently barely grazed mechanistic framework of solid-state milling reactions, which is a prerequisite for their systematic use and utilisation in Green Chemistry synthetic alternatives, which would be a critical requirement for any industrial application of LAG.

This project should contribute implementation of MCh for a cleaner chemical laboratory and a sustainable, low-waste and low-emissions chemical and pharmaceutical industry.

It is unacceptable that further development of such an important methodology depends on a mere trial and error or, at best, on the experimenter's experience and instincts.

Here, recently developed techniques for in situ real-time monitoring of MCh reactions by X-ray diffraction and Raman spectroscopy will be employed to enable insight into uninterrupted reactions and thus resolution of mechanistic pathways and kinetics of the selected representative simple reactions. The obtained data will be interpreted with respect of properties of liquids added to LAG systems.

It is expected that in this way the catalytic action of liquids in LAG reactions will be put to a firmer ground.

The accumulated fundamental understanding of LAG reactions will be then applied to develop or improve Green Chemistry procedures for selected environmentally relevant processes and materials.

This should consequently lead to optimisation of these processes, setting them ready for scale-up to ecologically friendlier, sustainable industrial processes.