Semi-industrial plan to produce inorganic metallic

Iranian chemical engineering experts presented an industrial approach to reduce the agglomeration of the particles during the fluidization process by studying the fluidization behavior of silver oxide nanoparticle agglomerates and using computational fluid dynamics (CFD) simulation method. Results of this research can be widely used in various industries such as petrochemical engineering, pharmaceutics, production of chemical powders at semi-industrial and industrial scales, color industry and ceramics. The research was carried out to investigate the fluidization behavior of silver oxide nanoparticle agglomerates to present approaches to reduce the amount of particle agglomeration during the fluidization process through the two viewpoints of laboratorial scale and computational fluid dynamics (CFD) simulation. In order to carry out the research, silver oxide nanoparticles with initial particle size of about 30 nm, which were produced from a chemical solution, were at the first stage inserted into a fluidized bed then dried by blowing warm air into the bed. The undesirable agglomeration phenomenon during the drying process and the fluidization of nanoparticles causes the particles to stick together and to form larger bulks. As a result, the size of the secondary particles increases and their effective properties reduce. Therefore, in order to overcome this problem, the researchers tried to minimize the amount of agglomeration during the fluidization of the particles by improving the hydrodynamic properties of the bed, including porosity, velocity of inlet gas, initial filling amount, and geometric design of the bed. Among the most important results of the research, mention can be made of the determination of optimum hydrodynamic conditions to decrease the amount of agglomeration of nanoparticles at laboratorial and simulation scales, and the investigation of the existing hydrodynamic models to study the fluidization behavior of silver oxide nanoparticle agglomerates to be used in the semi-industrial production of chemical powders. Results of the research have been published on 10 May 2013 in Industrial Engineering Chemistry Research, vol. 52, issue 22. For more information about the details of the research, study the full article on pages 7569-7578 on the same journal.