SolvSpace: Towards sustainable solvent selection for micro- and nanomanufacturing

Solvent-based methods have gained substantial popularity for the preparation of micro and nanomaterials. The precision and versatility embedded within these methods enabled the synthesis of highly functional materials for drug encapsulation, print electronics, and biomedical applications. Current reliance on hazardous solvents, due to neglected sustainability aspects during preliminary development, significantly undermined the potential for up-scaled manufacturing. However, the identification of more sustainable solvent substitutions is hindered by the lack of practical guidance for manufacturing technologies. This study presents a solvent selection tool, SolvSpace, generated with unsupervised clustering and similarity scoring from a database containing physical properties and quantitative sustainability metrics of 58 common solvents. Using electrohydrodynamic as a model technology, rigorous validation experiments demonstrated the robustness of SolvSpace in converting experiment recipes into more sustainable alternatives, with minimum compromise in product properties or adjustments to operating parameters. Further exploration examined γ-valerolactone for the first time in electrospraying poly(lactic-co-glycolic acid) micro and nanoparticles as a renewable substitution to N, N-dimethylacetamide. Overall, this practical and informative solvent guide is expected to empower translational laboratory research and sustainable industrial production of nanomaterials, towards a more sustainable future of micro and nanomanufacturing.