Design and simulation of a uniform irradiance photochemical platform

Abstract

The growth of photochemistry and high throughput experimentation in well plates and flow drives interest in photochemical platforms that provide spatially uniform irradiation of reactions. Here, we present a design of a versatile, uniform light platform for photochemistry to enable increased performance and reproducibility for high throughput experimentation in shallow well plates, in-plane flow reactors, and droplets. The design of the platform is driven by the development of an open-source ray tracing light simulation package. Radiometry provides experimental validation of the system's irradiance and irradiance uniformity. The usefulness of the approach is demonstrated by application to the photoinduced electron transfer–reversible addition–fragmentation chain transfer polymerization of methyl acrylate.