Zimmer and Peacock Ltd’s Post

Transcript

Hi, this is a video from Zimmer Peacock where I want to talk really about our micro volume electrochemical experiments. O I've sort of jump into it and sort of asked the question when people are often doing Electro analytical work or electric synthetic work, they will use volumes like 5 mills, 50 mils, 500 milliliters. And they may think, oh that's perfectly fine, but I might ask the question why not just use 50 microliters? And I'll explain what I mean by that. Now the advantage of going. Smaller volume is basically they're easier to set up these experiments. Therefore you get a higher throughput of experimentation. You get higher numbers of repeats for each experiment so that the data is more statistically, let's say, important. And also it means that you you're wasted, you know, in terms of solvents is at least in this study, you know, is, is or this video is several orders of magnitude decreased. So I think there's a lot of efficiencies from going small. People sort of think that the electrochemical experiments, especially when you're doing a synthesis is actually to make the material, but it's not really, it's actually to collect the data. But let me go forward a little bit with this thesis. So the problem that I sort of see today is somebody's going to do. Electro experiments, it could be electric catalysis, it could be electrosynthesis, but they may have a setup that's a bit like this where you have obviously the potential start the laptop and you have the electrochemical cell. Now these electrochemical cells can be quite large. It's not unreasonable that they may be 50 milliliters and people kind of know where a pain they are to actually set up. So there's a sort of, you know, you have to be respectful of your time and even, you know, academic and students. Time because time is not so much money, but if you can use time more efficiently, then we can do more experiments, we get more data and we can basically progress faster. So we need to kind of, I think reduce the setup time and other things like the solvent use in these kind of experiments. So let me describe what I think. So we have a typical kind of electrochemical cell like this. We have our reference and our working and our counter electrode in it. Just looking at these cells, you know, you know that you have to kind of get these electrodes, put them in there, clip all the connectors up and put the solvent in there. It does essentially take efforts. Now at ZP we have quite a strong background in vitro diagnostics world. So the technology now that I'm sort of showing on the far right here is. Actually a screen printed electrode, and it has all the electrodes upon it and it also has quite a small size. And I'll show why I think that's an advantage in many aspects of electrochemical research. So for example, in the previous cell, if you wanted a carbon electrode, you'd use something like maybe a sort of glassy disk electrode like this. But actually when you use a screen printed electrode like this, you get your working electrodes, you get your counter electrodes, and you get your reference electrode. It's quite elegant. That everything is on the same substrate. And I should quickly say that you'll see in some links that I will have underneath this video that we are talking about less than ���50 cents each. So this is less than $0.50 U.S. dollars, less than 50 P UK pounds, less than $0.50. European. European put it that way. So what we are talking about here is. And this is something that we do quite regularly as we'll take a screen printer electrodes and we'll put it into one of our potential sets. You're not obliged to use one of our potential stats. We'll put a drop on like that and immediately we're good to go. This setup can take us far less than a minute. It takes some seconds to do what we're doing and then we put the solution on there and we can do, in this case we're doing Electro analytical work. So ZP, we do make a lot of these screen printed electrodes and because of the nature of the business, we tend to do a lot of. As I say, as I stated already, electroanalytical work, but the question then is why is this technology sort of reserved for electrical work? Can we not bring it into an electric catalytic work or bring it into electrosynthesis work, etc. So you can get a perfectly good normal cyclical tomogram, for example, out of something like A50 microliter drop when you look at this setup and there's no training cables, there's no sort of glass that's screwing caps on, et cetera. Prepare the solution on sits on the tip of the electrode as I've shown here, or the electrodes are immediately in place and you can get some good quality and cycle photometry out of that. Really no issues. I will extend and say that it's not limited to psychopath territory. We can talk about current potentiometry, chronometry, these can all be done. And how to use these screen printed electrodes? So here's a screen printed electrodes. The object or the scripted electrode will go into connectors. And these connectors can be connected to existing, I want to say power supplies or potential stats. So that electrode here is 7mm across. The slot on the front of this connector block is 7mm. So the connector slides into the connector block. And then at the back here there's some banana plugs or banana receptacles. And then if you've got a sort of potential. That for example like this and it has banana plugs. Now these connectors come in 2mm, three millimeter 4mm flavors. So you can take if you're potentially that has 2mm banana plugs on it, you need the 2mm adapter if you have 3 millimeter 3mm. If you have 4mm, use the 4mm. But we're pretty good at making an adapter that goes between the cables that are on the power supply or the potential stack and then. But you basically being the glue between our screen printed electrode and the potential state or power supply. I do want to say that I will have a list of. Links underneath this video as well. So I'll go forward a little bit. I just want to sort of dive straight a little bit into electric since at the moment and take electrosynthesis, if you're interested, is actually the electrosynthesis or the electrocatalysis. I think it's a similar story really, but for example, I have an electrode here and we could put a solution on top of it. We can do something like cycle of optometry. What's useful about that then is you can kind of figure out what's my ideal potential for my experiments I've chosen. Good to be under sort of diffusion control. You can then set up something like a current parametric experiments where you're going to essentially fix the potential and just follow the current. Now, if I talk about electrosynthesis in particular because I have a bit of a background in it, you're gonna, we all know that can have this current that kind of falls with time and this fall with time could actually be quite quick. What I'm expecting is. I think that wrongly people think that the outcome of even electrosynthesis should be the material itself. It's not. It's the data that you're really after. So you can do quick CV decide what the potential that you're going to do that is don't change anything. Just stay on the screen printed electrode and now apply that poise potential and the current will drop with time. And if you want to use traditional analytical equipment like HPLC, LCMS. Just take a tiny little aliquot off the drop. And you can take them serious at a time and then you can put rack those up on the HPLC. So it's kind of saying that this idea that you could get useful data out of A50 microliter drop. Works really nicely because actually analytical equipment these days. It's got really quite sensitive and so you could have a tiny microliter experiment. We just take off tiny little sample, put it in a vial, diluting that up a bit and then putting that on the HPLC system and sort of so you're not only got these sort of electrochemical data, but you can still have your traditional kind of analytical data at the same time as well. I said I put some useful links up here, so if you want a carbon electrode, try and get through to the YouTube channel and you'll find these links underneath the video. This is the carbon electrode. This is the gold electrode. This is the platinum electrode. They come in a big sheet like this. This sheet has 300 electrodes on it. I think it's at least for the carbon. It's ���250 and you can essentially just pop out each electrode, just pop it out, use it. Now this does overcome something quite interesting because. Electric chemistry often affects electrodes, so people end up either polishing them, but do they really Polish them back to the original state? It's, it's all fine, but it's all manual efforts and you know, manual efforts, great. But I think the most valuable time that people actually have is their time or sorry, the most valuable asset they have is their time. And so the idea that you'll use it, get the data. If you need to do the experiment again, get a new one, get the data. I mean, this is not a bad use of people's time. I would suggest the bigger picture on this is it's not really going to be part of this video is. And the bigger picture is at the moment I'm showing, I think how to save time in the more electoral synthetic electrocatalytic space. But the bigger saving with with time will come when we start doing, I want to say stuff like this. But what I mean by stuff like this is, and we also have a robotic system which actually allows you to then if you can do a bit of scoping work in your lab, you can end up really scaling your discovery by actually. Using it on a robotic system and that robotic system also works with. A parallel potential stats that we have. So rather doing one experiment, you can do 6 experiments at 50 microliters each. And imagine that now that you know, essentially you know, if you did six to six repeats, you've suddenly got a lot more statistical data or more data for statistical analysis than you did at the moment. You probably do 6 sequential experiments, so you probably do three anyway because you want to get the work done. Scale up is actually not such an issue. Either I do want to show you now that we also have a little flow cells that can take these screen printed electrodes as well. I still think there's plenty of scope for, there's definitely plenty of scope for creativity because you've got to think about that flow through. You got to think about that dwell time in the in the flow cell. But I just want you to know that, you know, the idea that you could, when I say you could go in a parallel nature using the robot, you could go to parallel nature using the potentiostat, or you could use the flow cell as well to let's say scale up is also an option. And again, useful links and the robot is linked to the potential that there is linked to it and the flow cell is linked to. So I've just wanted to sort of bring together. Technologies that we use in electroanalytical space and in vitro diagnostics and it's all electrochemical based, but how can we then use these in discovery in the more sort of synthesis side of electric chemistry? So if you have any questions regarding this, don't hesitate to reach out to us and be happy to have a conversation about it. OK, Thanks very much.