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The many flavours of mechanochemistry and its plausible conceptual underpinnings

Nature Reviews Chemistry volume 5, pages 148–167 (2021)Cite this article

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Abstract

Mechanochemistry describes diverse phenomena in which mechanical load affects chemical reactivity. The fuzziness of this definition means that it includes processes as seemingly disparate as motor protein function, organic synthesis in a ball mill, reactions at a propagating crack, chemical actuation, and polymer fragmentation in fast solvent flows and in mastication. In chemistry, the rate of a reaction in a flask does not depend on how fast the flask moves in space. In mechanochemistry, the rate at which a material is deformed affects which and how many bonds break. In other words, in some manifestations of mechanochemistry, macroscopic motion powers otherwise endergonic reactions. In others, spontaneous chemical reactions drive mechanical motion. Neither requires thermal or electrostatic gradients. Distinct manifestations of mechanochemistry are conventionally treated as being conceptually independent, which slows the field in its transformation from being a collection of observations to a rigorous discipline. In this Review, we highlight observations suggesting that the unifying feature of mechanochemical phenomena may be the coupling between inertial motion at the microscale to macroscale and changes in chemical bonding enabled by transient build-up and relaxation of strains, from macroscopic to molecular. This dynamic coupling across multiple length scales and timescales also greatly complicates the conceptual understanding of mechanochemistry.

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Fig. 1: A proposed taxonomy of molecular mechanochemistry.
Fig. 2: Single-molecule force spectroscopy of a mechanochemically active copolymer of two isomeric macrocyclic cinnamate dimers.
Fig. 3: Acoustic cavitation in liquid.
Fig. 4: Examples of covalent reactions that are accelerated in stretched polymers.
Fig. 5: Mechanistic and structure–activity studies in polymer mechanochemistry.
Fig. 6: Mechanochemical reaction cascades for crosslinking and small-molecule release.
Fig. 7: Depolymerization and all-mechanochemical cascades.
Fig. 8: Reactions reported to proceed in milled solids but not in solution42,194,195,196,197.
Fig. 9: Small-molecule models reproduce effects observed in polymer mechanochemistry.

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Acknowledgements

The authors thank the funders that supported their work in mechanochemistry in the past decade, particularly the US National Science Foundation, the US Air Force, the Petroleum Research Fund of the American Chemical Society, the UK Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council, the Royal Society, the Newton Fund, the University of Liverpool and Michelin. They also thank their collaborators in mechanochemistry, especially S. L. Craig, W. Weng and W. Zhang.

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    Robert T. O’Neill & Roman Boulatov

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O’Neill, R.T., Boulatov, R. The many flavours of mechanochemistry and its plausible conceptual underpinnings. Nat Rev Chem 5, 148–167 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41570-020-00249-y

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