Continuous flow synthesis enabling reaction discovery

This article defines the role that continuous flow chemistry can have in new reaction discovery, thereby creating molecular assembly opportunities beyond our current capabilities. Most notably the focus is based upon photochemical, electrochemical and temperature sensitive processes where continuous flow methods and machine assisted processing can have significant impact on chemical reactivity patterns. These flow chemical platforms are ideally placed to exploit future innovation in data acquisition, feed-back and control through artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) techniques. This Perspective article highlights recent studies in which continuous flow approaches exploiting photochemical, electrochemical, and thermal reactions led to the discovery and subsequent exploitation of new reactions and reactivity patterns.