Scale-Up of the Polyol Process for Nanomaterial Synthesis

Samir Farhat, Nassima Ouar, Mongia Hosni, Ivaylo Hinkov, Silvana Mercone, Frédéric Schoenstein, Noureddine Jouini

Département de Génie Chimique Université de Technologie Chimique et de Métallurgique, 8 Boulevard St. Kliment Ohridski, 1756 Sofia, Bulgarie.
Laboratoire des Sciences des Procédés et des Matériaux, CNRS, LSPM-UPR 3407, Université Paris 13, PRES Sorbonne-Paris-Cité, 99 Avenue J.-B. Clément, 93430 Villetaneuse, France.

DOI: 10.4236/msce.2014.29001                

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.

Keywords

CFD Simulation, Polyol Process, Nanomaterial Synthesis

Conflicts of Interest

The authors declare no conflicts of interest.

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