Reliable Mechanochemistry: Protocols for Reproducible Outcomes of Neat and Liquid Assisted Ball-mill Grinding Experiments

The equilibrium outcomes of ball mill grinding can dramatically change as a function of even tiny variations in the experimental conditions such as the presence of very small amounts of added solvent. To reproducibly and accurately capture this sensitivity, the experimentalist needs to carefully consider every single factor that can affect the ball mill grinding reaction under investigation, from ensuring the grinding jars are clean and dry before use, to accurately adding the stoichiometry of the starting materials, to validating that the delivery of solvent volume is accurate, to ensuring that the interaction between the solvent and the powder is well understood and, if necessary, a specific soaking time is added to the procedure. Preliminary kinetic studies are essential to determine the necessary milling time to achieve equilibrium. Only then can exquisite phase composition curves be obtained as a function of the solvent concentration under ball mill liquid assisted grinding (LAG). By using strict and careful procedures analogous to the ones here presented, such milling equilibrium curves can be obtained for virtually all milling systems. The system we use to demonstrate these procedures is a disulfide exchange reaction starting from the equimolar mixture of two homodimers to obtain at equilibrium quantitative heterodimer. The latter is formed by ball mill grinding as two different polymorphs, Form A and Form B. The ratio R = [Form B] / ([Form A] + [Form B]) at milling equilibrium depends on the nature and concentration of the solvent in the milling jar.