TITLE:
Scale-Up of the Polyol Process for Nanomaterial Synthesis
AUTHORS:
Samir Farhat, Nassima Ouar, Mongia Hosni, Ivaylo Hinkov, Silvana Mercone, Frédéric Schoenstein, Noureddine Jouini
KEYWORDS:
CFD Simulation, Polyol Process, Nanomaterial Synthesis
JOURNAL NAME:
Journal of Materials Science and Chemical Engineering,
Vol.2 No.9,
September
9,
2014
ABSTRACT: Two classes of inorganic materials such as metallic nanowires and metal oxides nanorods were synthesized using the polyol process and scaled-up to produce macroscopic quantities. Scale-up strategy was successfully built by performing the synthesis in a 15 cm diameter, 4.5 litersvolume cylindrical tank using a straight paddle impeller and a Rushton turbine. The actual yield of the synthesis is ~45 grams per batch for zinc oxide nanorods and ~20 grams per batch for cobalt nickel nanowires. Under the same rotation speed, the aspect ratio of the produced nanowires and nanorods using the Rushton turbine impeller with radial flow patterns has shown a lower aspect ratio, nanoparticle size and polydispersity. This is attributed to the increase of the local dissipated energy as spatially calculated by computational fluid dynamics (CFD) that is proposed to design, optimize and scale-up the polyol process.