Perspective on the application of continuous flow chemistry for polymer-based organic electronics

Abstract

Continuous flow chemistry offers a fast entry to commercial production for innovative polymers of diverse nature. A field that could hugely benefit from this gateway is organic electronics. For some of the most promising organic semiconductor technologies, push–pull type conjugated polymers afford the optimum performance metrics to date. However, the production of these polymers by classical batch synthesis procedures is accompanied by inherent issues with respect to the reproducibility of material properties such as molar mass and end-group fidelity, which strongly impact the final device performance. Flow chemistry could provide (part of) the solution here, but its full potential still has to be unravelled and embraced by the academic community as well as the interested industries. In this perspective, we present some specific cases to illustrate the state of affairs with respect to the flow synthesis of conjugated polymers, its benefits in the context of organic electronics, the challenges one is faced with when producing (push–pull) conjugated polymers by flow methods, and some future prospects.