PhD students who have been undertaking work at the DReaM Facility have collaborated to review some fundamental engineering aspects of FlowNMR setups.

This will help avoid common pitfalls and work towards establishing good practice quality guidelines (GxP) for FlowNMR investigations in academia and industry. The key issues outlined in this work will be referred to in many future studies using FlowNMR setups.

Jeroen Vrijsen visited from Prof Tanja Junkers' group at Monash University and worked with Isabel Thomlinson to couple a continuous flow reactor to the NMR spectrometer in the DReaM Facility.

The researchers used diffusion ordered NMR spectroscopy to study polymer molecular weight evolution. This has advantages over other methods, such as size exclusion chromatography.

Alejandro Bara Estaun's PhD work has been published as part of the themed collection "Reaction mechanisms in catalysis".

It is challenging to study hydroformylation reactions as they occur, due to the high pressure of hydrogen and carbon monoxide used. This method has allowed the researchers to obtain knowledge of the catalytic species present.

The associated Faraday Discussion meeting took place online from the 17th to the 19th February 2021.

PhD student Dan Berry has had his work published in Faraday Discussions, as part of the themed collection "Mechanistic processes in organometallic chemistry".

Simultaneous use of the NMR spectrometer, HPLC, headspace mass spectrometer and UV/Vis spectrometer yielded complementary information about the catalytic process occurring.

The Faraday Discussion meeting for this article was held in York, from the 2nd to the 4th September 2019.

Dr Andrew Hall has had some of his postgraduate research published in ACS Catalysis. To study and quantify low concentrations of ruthenium hydride compounds by NMR, selective excitation experiments have been used. The researchers have showed the existence of two independent catalyst deactivation/inhibition pathways.

Dr Ulrich Hintermair's PhD students, Andrew Hall and Rachael Broomfield-Tagg, have worked with Matthew Camilleri and Dr David Carbery to successfully study a photocatalytic reaction via FlowNMR.