Experimental assessment of bulk vs microfluidic reactors for nano-bio-photocatalyst synthesis and antibiotic degradation

In this work, several characteristics of microfluidic and bulk reactors, such as synthesis, activity, kinetics, and stability, have been compared. Synthesis aspects reveal that the microfluidic system is more successful in reducing the size distribution. Moreover, synthesis temperature and time have been decreased from above 100 °C to room temperature and from hours to minutes. Two superb properties of microfluidic system which assist the synthesis of nano-materials are the selective incorporation of nanoparticles (M4) and local heating (M5). The bio-photo-catalyst synthesized in microreactor M1 at 70 °C is capable of up amoxicillin (with a high concentration of 50 ppm) degradation with 100% efficiency. The kinetics data can show that the reaction rate in microfluidic system is more than 40 times of the bulk. The stability test showed that after five cycles of use, 95% and 70 of the efficiency over amoxicillin degradation has been kept in microfluidic (M5) and bulk systems, respectively.