Transforming nanoscience into products

The practical application of nanotechnology in the process sectors and their client industries relies heavily on the ability to incorporate nanoparticles into final products in a fully dispersed and stable state. This requires expertise from different disciplines to be able to produce new products and develop new process technologies whilst maintaining safe and energy-efficient operations, with minimal waste production.

Current knowledge in the field, however, does not allow the design of these processes based on fundamental understanding. Often a trial-and-error type of approach is taken for design and scale-up. This constitutes a major barrier to taking a new product to market within a short period of time. In addition to the waste associated with the preliminary trial work, the actual manufacturing processes, which are not optimised, result in excessive waste production.

PROFORM is a partnership of 10 organisations that was formed to address these issues and replace at least part of the empiricism with design guides based on a fundamental understanding. The initiative has gained partial funding under the European Commission's Framework Programme 6.

Project partners — Karlsruhe, Loughborough, Warsaw, Birmingham and Poznan universities — provide a strong academic foundation to PROFORM, which brings together expertise covering many aspects of the process. Building on this foundation are the SMEs — BHR, C3M and Rockfield — that are well placed to exploit the scientific breakthrough through the development of appropriate process engineering tools and methods.

The project also has a health and consumer care industrial involvement with Bayer Technology Services and Unilever UK Central Resources participating in the technical development and also assessing the long-term business potential of the results of the work. Integration has been crucial as all of the work packages require multi-partner involvement.

As a collaborative project, PROFORM aims to investigate the incorporation and dispersion processes of nanoparticles into a liquid medium during product formulation. The process is schematically shown above.

PROFORM partners have also targeted the development of the next generation of process tools and methods for the design and manufacture of products containing nano-particles in a highly dispersed, functional and stable state.

This work has required a fundamental investigation of phenomena related to the processing of nano-particles, including multi-scale hydrodynamics, stability and manipulation of the medium composition.

The work programme consisted of both experimental and numerical tasks to characterise the particles and dispersions, and to investigate the incorporation of nanoparticles into a liquid and the break-up of nanoparticle clusters under different process conditions.

The research carried out on the various aspects of the processes involved, both experimental and numerical, has considered the same reference systems, allowing direct comparison of findings. The ultimate aim is to produce a design guide that will incorporate all the findings from the project.


The project has been successful in reaching its objectives and some of the achievements so far include:

- Identification of appropriate methods and protocols for characterising nano-particles and nanoparticle dispersions, including further techniques to be developed

- A databank of generic information for characterising reference particles and nanoparticle dispersions, for example wettability, particle size distribution, surface free energy, morphology and rheology

- Identification of the mechanisms of the break-up of nanoparticle clusters

- Identification of criteria to determine the performance of different process devices and assessment of the performance of these for the break-up of nanoparticle clusters

- Models describing the dispersion of nanoparticles in liquid media

- Models describing the rheology of nanoparticle dispersions

- Evaluation of the effects of the chemical composition of the liquid medium on the break-up of nanoparticle clusters

- Numerical models for the kinetics of sub-processes, fluid flow and mixing

Some of the project findings have been reported in other publications, details of which are available from the PROFORM organisers.

PROFORM is already leading to a number of other projects within partner organisations, some aiming to take the generic findings further to apply to specific processes and products, some with other funding from industry or funding organisations to address other related aspects.

The project has also been a vehicle for the training of a number of research students and post-doctoral researchers in academia and industry. Some of the overall findings have been published and are also being incorporated in training course material.



Acknowledgements

This PROFORM project is partially funded by FP6 of the EC. The abstract was prepared in collaboration with other project partners: Karlsruhe University; Bayer Technology Services GmbH; Loughborough University; Unilever UK Central Resources Ltd; Birmingham University; Warsaw University of Technology; Poznan University of Technology; Rockfield Software Ltd; C3M d.o.o.