Support for flow chemistry education

Free Laboratory Teaching Materials available with all new E-Series systems

The new E-Series system from Vapourtec was developed with three main design goals:

  • Ease of use
  • Robustness
  • Affordability

One of the key reasons for this set of requirements is to help bring flow chemistry into University teaching courses, thus enabling students to be more aware of this increasingly important technique.

With this in mind, Vapourtec has developed (in conjunction with the New Synthetic Methods Group at the University of Connecticut) a set of laboratory teaching materials that introduce students to the key concepts of flow chemistry and include practical teaching experiments.

This free E-Series customers booklet ‘An Introduction to Flow Chemistry – A Practical Laboratory Guide’ makes it possible to include hands on flow chemistry in the undergraduate chemistry syllabus with minimum effort.

Register to download the teaching guide

What is included?

The package consists of 9 different flow reactions each designed to fit within a 3 hour laboratory practical session. Each experiment includes:


  • An introduction and the appropriate background information for students to become acquainted with before starting.

  • Detailed instructions for correctly setting up the equipment for the experiment are included, in the diagrammatic and step-by-step form.

  • A simple user guide for the E-Series system is included, telling students what they need to know without requiring that they read a manual.

  • Step-by-step instructions for the whole experiment are available in checklist form including all workups.

About the experiments

Each experiment is designed for a 3 hr laboratory practical session.

With reliable pumping and push button priming the E-Series system ensures that the students can complete the whole experiment in the allotted time and each reaction has been extensively tested (using real undergraduates!) to ensure reliable outcomes if the method is adhered to.

The experiments include the following reactions:

  1. Diels-Alder [4+2] Cycloaddition – Preparation of a Bicyclic Lactone
  2. Prepataion of a Heterocycle – A Paar-Knorr Pyrrole Synthesis
  3. Preparation of a Bromoarene – Electrophilic Aromatic Bromination
  4. Preparation of a Carbamate – The Hoffmann Rearrangement
  5. Preparation of an Ester – Oxidation of an Aldehyde to a Methyl Ester
  6. Preparation of a Coumarin – A Knovenagel Condensation Reaction
  7. Preparation of a Cyclopentene: A Ring Closing Metathesis Reaction
  8. A Nucleophilic Acyl Substitution Reaction – Preparation of an Ester
  9. Preparation of a Biaryl – A Suzuki Cross Coupling Reaction

To download a sample of this content, please sign up to our knowledge base

About the Teaching Materials

There is no charge for the materials – they are freely available to all E-Series owners.

Educational establishments are granted a license to reproduce the materials (which must be in their full form with all attribution intact) for distribution within their institution and may charge nominal reproduction costs to students as required.

The documents may not, however, be distributed or resold outside the institution and may not be reproduced in a modified form.