Flow Chemistry in Contemporary Chemical Sciences: A Real Variety of Its Applications

Flow chemistry is an area of contemporary chemistry exploiting the hydrodynamic conditions of flowing liquids to provide particular environments for chemical reactions. These particular conditions of enhanced and strictly regulated transport of reagents, improved interface contacts, intensification of heat transfer, and safe operation with hazardous chemicals can be utilized in chemical synthesis, both for mechanization and automation of analytical procedures, and for the investigation of the kinetics of ultrafast reactions. Such methods are developed for more than half a century. In the field of chemical synthesis, they are used mostly in pharmaceutical chemistry for efficient syntheses of small amounts of active substances. In analytical chemistry, flow measuring systems are designed for environmental applications and industrial monitoring, as well as medical and pharmaceutical analysis, providing essential enhancement of the yield of analyses and precision of analytical determinations. The main concept of this review is to show the overlapping of development trends in the design of instrumentation and various ways of the utilization of specificity of chemical operations under flow conditions, especially for synthetic and analytical purposes, with a simultaneous presentation of the still rather limited correspondence between these two main areas of flow chemistry.