HEDON - High Energy Dispersion of Nanoparticles

工程纳米颗粒的加入已被证明可以显著改善许多材料的性能，并且在大多数工业中广泛使用它们的商业兴趣日益增长。例如，碳纳米管和石墨烯被证明对聚合物的抗拉强度、电导率和导热性等性能有巨大的影响。在非有机颗粒领域也有许多例子，例如纳米二氧化钛被用于透明的抗紫外线涂层。迄今为止，大部分的兴奋、兴趣和投资都集中在创造高质量、均匀的各种粒子上。然而，要在实际应用中使用，这些通常需要混合到流体介质中。不幸的是，小的长度尺度导致了强烈的颗粒间作用力，当颗粒被添加到流体中时，通常会导致颗粒聚集（形成块状），并失去许多特殊的“纳米”特性。纳米颗粒在流体中的有效分散和稳定通常需要化学和高机械能的结合。在实验室中，超声波混合器和介质混合器是目前最先进的机械混合设备，但它们很难扩大规模，而且仅限于低粘度。TecExec Limited是一家英国公司，在过去的20年里开发了一系列创新的混合技术。它专注于高能混合器，这些混合器被世界各地的公司用于工业规模的过程强化应用。TecExec集团最近开发了具有异常高性能的转子-定子机器并获得了专利，该公司认为这种机器可以用于纳米颗粒的分散。该项目打算用工业规模应用的真实客户材料来测试这一假设，从而为大规模开发打开市场。

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.