Scaling-up metal nanoparticle production by transferred arc discharge

摘要

The number of applications and products containing metal nanomaterials has significantly increased over the past years. In order to address the upcoming demand for metal nanoparticles, new scale-up strategies are required. The scale-up of nanoparticle synthesis, especially for metals, is however very challenging. This study reports about a production facility with a new scale-up approach for pure metal nanoparticles. The scale-up approach is the parallelization of multiple transferred arcs in one reactor, which were previously individually optimized. Furthermore, a novel filtration and bagging system is introduced, which is designed to handle pyrophoric metal nanoparticles. It is shown that the production rate of the process scales linearly with the number of transferred arcs, while the particle size stays on the nanoscale.