A framework for general-purpose chemical synthesis in the aerosol phase and its automated implementation in an open hardware platform

Aerosols have emerged as a medium promising accelerated reactivity and significantly modified product distribution, yet exploration of these properties have so far only been confined to specific reactions. Wider deployment in chemical synthesis and discovery is impeded by the lack of a general-purpose formalism for conceiving multi-step aerosol syntheses, nor standardized building blocks to enable adaptation of existing synthesis procedures to execution in the aerosol phase. Here we propose a framework based on the timed release of reagents as atomized solutions that provides the minimum necessary building blocks for synthesis in an adaptable aerosol reactor. This framework both connects synthesis in traditional bulk media with aerosols and lays the foundation for massively parallel discovery in aerosols. To validate our proposed formalism with a concrete methodology we demonstrate a prototype hardware platform and examples of automated procedures, with early demonstration of the utility of optical microscopy to interrogate the spatial distribution of droplet compositions.