Processing Nanoparticles in Suspension of High Solid Concentration: On-line Characterisation and Process Modelling
Lead Research Organisation:
University of Leeds
Department Name: Inst of Particle Science & Engineering
Abstract
Manufacture of nanometre particulate form products in suspensions is becoming increasingly important to the pharmaceutical, speciality chemical, and functional material industries. For instance, nano-processing is now used as an effective drug-delivery method for solid form hydrophobic pharmaceuticals due to the dramatically increased drug solubility and bioavailability at nano-scale. The biggest challenge to nano-processing under industrial conditions has been highlighted as the difficulty in achieving consistency in product quality as characterised by particle size distribution. The objective of this proposed research is to investigate on-line characterisation and process modelling techniques that can be applied under industrial operational conditions. The research on on-line sensing will focus on photon correlation spectroscopy and acoustic spectroscopy for real-time particle sizing. The work will tackle the key challenge posed by multiple scattering and particle-particle interactions, which are known to be the cause leading to incorrect measurement at high solid concentrations. High solid concentration is not only the economically viable range for commercial manufacture of nanoparticles (a much larger reactor would be required to process the same amount of particles in low concentration), but also technically essential for producing ultra-fine particles for many processes. The on-line real-time measurement will provide invaluable data to the development of process models using population balance equations. The focus will be on quantitatively deriving models for particle breakage and aggregation to be used in the population balance equations, as well as intelligent interpretation of the data to improve the qualitative understanding of the process. The process chosen for investigation is wet nano-milling, a very important operation for processing nanoparticles in the pharmaceutical, agrochemical and materials industries.
People |
ORCID iD |
Xue Wang (Principal Investigator) |
Publications
Boonkhao B
(2010)
Making use of process tomography data for multivariate statistical process control
in AIChE Journal
Falola A
(2013)
Extended method of moment for general population balance models including size dependent growth rate, aggregation and breakage kernels
in Computers & Chemical Engineering
Liu J
(2016)
Imaging protein crystal growth behaviour in batch cooling crystallisation
in Chinese Journal of Chemical Engineering
Liu W
(2014)
Analytical technology aided optimization and scale-up of impinging jet mixer for reactive crystallization process
in AIChE Journal
Liu W
(2014)
Solubility Measurement and Stability Study of Sodium Cefuroxime
in Journal of Chemical & Engineering Data
Liu W
(2016)
Continuous reactive crystallization of pharmaceuticals using impinging jet mixers
in AIChE Journal
Liu W
(2015)
Novel Impinging Jet and Continuous Crystallizer Design for Rapid Reactive Crystallization of Pharmaceuticals
in Procedia Engineering
Ma C
(2015)
Simulation for scale-up of a confined jet mixer for continuous hydrothermal flow synthesis of nanomaterials
in The Journal of Supercritical Fluids
Wang XZ
(2014)
Principal component and causal analysis of structural and acute in vitro toxicity data for nanoparticles.
in Nanotoxicology
Description | New technique developed for characterising slurries of nanoparticles |
Exploitation Route | new research |
Sectors | Agriculture Food and Drink Chemicals Energy Environment Manufacturing including Industrial Biotechology Pharmaceuticals and Medical Biotechnology |