NormandyFlowChem is a technical platform of the CARMeN institute dedicated to continuous flow synthesis. Its goal is to support chemists from academia and industry in their continuous flow Chemistry fundamental or applied projects via counseling, feasability studies, process development and/or chemists accomodation and formation thanks to the equipment range of the platform.

The birth of NormandyFlowChem

A projet-team federating several then-COBRA laboratory teams around continuous flow synthesis was constituted during year 2020's spring. This theme, initiated by J. Legros at his arrival at the COBRA laboratory, has been strongly reinforced on Rouen site in 2020 by the establishment of the " Autonomie Pharmaceutique Industrielle (Pharmaceutical Industrial Autonomy)" project supported by the french State and the Normandy region. The API project gathers researchers from the SynBioF team (Philippe Jubault, Thomas Poisson) and from the MESOO team (Julien Legros). This has led to the implementation of the NormandyFlowChem platform which is, at the moment, the most important academia platform dedicated to continuous flow synthesis in France. The project-team has since been reinforced by the arrival by CNRS transfer of Dr. Laetitia Chausset-Boissarie (MESOO team).

The CARMeN institute

The CARMeN Institute (Chimie Analytique et Réactivité Moléculaire en Normandie, Analytical Chemistry and Molecular Reactivity in Normandy), UMR 6064 created on 2025 January 1st, was constituted by the merging of the COBRA laboratory UMR 6014 (Mont-Saint-Aignan, Evreux and Madrillet sites) and the LCMT laboratory UMR 65O7 (Caen site). This new laboratory is, on 2025 January 1st, one of the most important in France for organic and analytial chemistry. Its staff is composed of around 110 permanent employees (researchers, lecturers, professors, and supporting personnel) along with around 100 PhD students, 50 post-doctoral researchers, 15 fixed-term supporting personnel employees and 15 graduate interns. The laboratory is located in four geographical locations: Mont-Saint-Aignan site, Madrillet/Saint-Etienne du Rouvray site, Evreux site and Caen site.

The CARMeN Institute has 6 development axis:

1. Development of new synthetic methods in the domains of heterocycles, heterochemistry, metal-mediated chemistry and metal and organic catalytic approaches.
2. Usage of innovative technologies for synthesis (photocatalysis, photochemistry, continuous flow chemistry, electrochemistry, radical chemistry, hyperbaric and microfluidic chemistry).
3. Development of new tools in NMR, mass spectroscopy and theoretical chemistry.
4. Reaction intermiediates identification and reaction mechanism elucidation to enhance reactions efficiency and selectivity.
5. Development of new versatile and adaptable tools (synthetic and analytical tools) to study life mechanisms, sustainable development and environmental chemisty.
6. Development of sustainable organic materials (energy, recycling, biosourced materials).

The CARMeN Institute is integrated in CARNOT I2C, SynOrg LabEx, and EUR XLChem, three tools from PIA.