Efficient Flow Synthesis of Aspirin within 2D Sub-Nanoconfined Laminar Annealed Graphene Oxide Membranes

Xiang Li; Shuai Pang; Yuhui Zhang; Jiangwei Fu; Guandi He; Bo Song; Daoling Peng; Xiqi Zhang; Lei Jiang

doi:10.1002/adma.202310954

Efficient Flow Synthesis of Aspirin within 2D Sub-Nanoconfined Laminar Annealed Graphene Oxide Membranes

Adv Mater. 2024 Mar;36(11):e2310954. doi: 10.1002/adma.202310954. Epub 2023 Dec 14.

Authors

Xiang Li^{1

2}, Shuai Pang^{1

3}, Yuhui Zhang^{1

3}, Jiangwei Fu^{1

2}, Guandi He^{1

2}, Bo Song^{4

5}, Daoling Peng^{4

6}, Xiqi Zhang^{1

4

7}, Lei Jiang^{1

2

4

7}

Affiliations

¹ Key Laboratory of Bio-Inspired Materials and Interfacial Science, Technical Institute of Physics and Chemistry, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, 100190, P. R. China.
² School of Future Technology, University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, 101407, P. R. China.
³ University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, 100049, P. R. China.
⁴ Science and Technology Center for Quantum Biology, National Institute of Extremely-Weak Magnetic Field Infrastructure, Hangzhou, 310051, P. R. China.
⁵ School of Optical-Electrical Computer Engineering, University of Shanghai for Science and Technology, Shanghai, 200093, P. R. China.
⁶ Key Laboratory of Theoretical Chemistry of Environment, Ministry of Education, School of Environment, South China Normal University, Guangzhou, 510006, P. R. China.
⁷ Binzhou Institute of Technology, Weiqiao-UCAS Science and Technology Park, Binzhou, 256600, P. R. China.

PMID: 38040416
DOI: 10.1002/adma.202310954

Abstract

The aim of this work is to develop an environmentally friendly, safe, and simple route for realizing efficient preparation of aspirin. Here, inspired by enzyme synthesis in vivo, the aspirin synthesis has been realized by sub-nanoconfined esterification with directional flow and ≈100% conversion in an unprecedented reaction time of <6.36 s at 23 °C. Such flow esterification reaction is catalyzed by thermally transformed graphene oxide (GO) membranes with tailored physicochemical properties, which can be obtained simply through a mild annealing method. A possible mechanism is revealed by density functional theory calculation, indicating that the synergistic effect of spatial confinement and surface electronic structure can significantly improve the catalytic performance. By restricting reactants within 2D sub-nano space created by GO-based laminar flow-reactors, the present strategy provides a new route to achieve rapid flow synthesis of aspirin with nearly complete conversion.

Keywords: aspirin synthesis; directional flow; graphene oxide membrane; interlayer sub-nanoconfinement; mild annealing.

Abstract

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