What is a microscale chemistry and its importance?

angge: What is a microscale chemistry and its importance?
I have tried searching microscale chemistry and have found some results already. But I need more information than what’s in wikipedia or other sites. Know any sources or helpful websites? Any help would be apprecoated. Thank you!

Answers and Views:

Answer by Scott
Chemistry proceedures using much smaller quantities of chemicals, reducing costs of proceedures and reduces waste dispsal.

Microscale Chemistry offers many benefits:

It reduces chemical use promoting waste reduction at the source.
It offers vastly improved laboratory safety by
Better Laboratory Air Quality.
Least Exposure to Toxic Chemicals.
No Fire and Explosion Hazards.
No Spills and Accidents.
It sharply reduces laboratory cost.
It requires shorter experiment time.
It implements excellent laboratory manipulative techniques.
It lowers glass breakage cost.
It saves storage space.
It improves laboratory skills.
It provides clean and productive environment.
It promotes the principle of 3Rs: Reduce, Recover and Recycle.
It creates the sense of ‘Green Chemistry’.
It changes the psychology of people using chemicals.
It is user friendly to people with physical disabilities.

Answer by Ryan S
As already stated, microscale chemistry is simply the practice of preforming experiments with minute quantities of reactants, solvent etc. There are safety and waste disposal benefits but I would encourage you to evaluate its use on a case by case basis. Some experiments (most notably recrystallizations in my experience) are a royal pain to do in microscale. There is little tolerance for experimental error when you are synthesizing a compound using only 20mg of reactant. In addition, microscale set-ups often require specialized glassware a bit different from the standard kits you might have seen in high school or college. Most of the items are not terribly expensive, but it is an additional cost. Medium-scale set-ups (.5-2 g reactants, 50-150mL solvent etc) tend to be more forgiving and thus (in my opinion) more useful educationally than microscale.