The UniSA’s Future Industries Institute expands its experimental capabilities with the synthWAVE microwave synthesis system

The University of South Australia is ranked in the top 2% of Universities Worldwide. The UniSA’s new multi-million dollar Future Industries Institute (FII) focuses on building knowledge and capacity in core future industries. The new Future Industries Institute (FII) focuses on four key area: Minerals and resources engineering, Energy and advanced manufacturing, Environmental science, and Biomaterials engineering and nanomedicine.
In particular, the Biomaterial and Nanomedice Research Center, headed by Prof. Ajayan Vinu has contributed greatly to the field of nanoporous materials. These porous materials have use in application areas such as redox catalysis, photocatalysis, electrocatalysis, secondary batteries, and supercapacitors etc.

The Group equipped itself with a Milestone synthWAVE high-pressure microwave reactor in 2016 with the intent of enhancing the traditional methods published on Chem. Mater., Vol. 12, No. 7, 2000. with a microwave system. Before the introduction of the synthWAVE, they were working on hydrothermal reactions with conventional heating sources for hydrothermal synthesis with the main challenge of reducing crystallization times that took several days. It essentially hindered the lab’s overall production since when they conducted hydrothermal reactions for synthesizing mesoporous silica, they couldn’t control the atmosphere and pressure inside the reactor and it took at least 2 days for the hydrothermal reaction to complete.

The group selected the synthWAVE to provide unique capabilities for their researchers and ‘expand experimental freedom’ so they could try new experimental conditions such as non-ambient atmosphere and extremely high pressure.
The main reason for choosing the Milestone synthWAVE is that it is the only high-pressure assisted microwave reactor available on the market. It handles single or multiple reactions at temperatures up to 300 °C and pressures to 199 bar.
With the synthWAVE, researchers have increased throughput thereby dramatically increasing the number of reactions per week with faster method development and parallel screening. The true value and the key advantage of the synthWAVE is the performance: microwave technology changed the way they design and optimize synthetic protocols. Moreover, they are able to develop quick synthesis of mesoporous silica and template-free synthesis of mesoporous carbon nitride.