HEDON - High Energy Dispersion of Nanoparticles

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The inclusion of engineered nanoparticles has been shown to dramatically improve theperformance of many materials and there is growing commercial interest in their widespreaduse across most industries. For example, carbon nanotubes and graphene are proving to havean enormous impact on properties such as tensile strength and electrical and thermalconductivity when added to polymers. There are also numerous examples in the field ofinorganic particles, such as nano titanium dioxide being used in transparent UV-resistantcoatings.Much of the excitement, interest and investment to date has been focused on the creation ofhigh quality, uniform particles of various kinds. However, to be used in real applications,these usually need to be mixed into a fluid medium. Unfortunately, the small length scalesinvolved result in strong inter-particulate forces that often cause particles to agglomerate(form lumps) when added to a fluid and lose many of their special “nano” properties.Effective dispersion and stabilisation of nano particles in fluids usually require a combinationof chemistry and high mechanical energy. In the laboratory, ultrasonic mixers and mediamills are currently the state-of-the-art for mechanical mixing but they are difficult to scale upand are limited to low viscosities.TecExec Limited is a British company that has developed a range of innovative mixingtechnologies over the last 20 years. It has concentrated on high energy mixers that are usedby companies all over the world in process intensification applications at industrial scales.The TecExec Group has recently developed and patented rotor-stator machines withexceptionally high performance that it believes could be used for nano particle dispersion.This project intends to test this hypothesis with real customer materials for industrial-scaleapplications and thereby open the market to large-scale exploitation.