Light induced seed generation for industrial crystallization
Crystallization is one of the most important separation techniques in the chemical industry. A wide variety of chemicals are produced industrially with this method. Despite its widespread use, currently implemented industrial crystallization processes rely on trial-error to ensure desired crystal quality --crystal size distribution, polymorphic form, crystal shape and purity. Therefore they struggle to keep up with current product quality demands.
We aim to perform a continuous crystallization process with enhanced seed generation and nucleation control based on the use of electromagnetic irradiation in the form of laser beams also referred to as NPLIN. Such a design will provide a significant improvement in the industrial-scale synthesis of tailored crystalline materials by enabling the controlled and predictive production of high quality, crystals for which no additional particle modification or recrystallization steps will be required.
The current objective is to (a) Designing experiments to explore the NPLIN working mechanism (b) Develop a microfluidic NPLIN experimental platform to process large amounts of data and perform statistical analysis, (c) characterizing the influence of flow on crystallization kinetics in lab-scale flow equipment operated in a continuous closed loop along with the crystal quality and explore different kinds of irradiation sources for NPLIN.