Production Scaleup of Reverse Micelle Synthesis

A wide range of techniques for the successful synthesis of nanosized materials have been developed recently. These procedures are sufficient for normal scientific investigation; however, for these materials to be incorporated into any practical application, the process for making them must be scalable to a larger volume. In this work, we focus on a published recipe for manganese zinc ferrite (MZFO) nanoparticles, which uses the reverse micelle synthesis technique. The normal bench-top synthesis has been scaled by a factor of 40 and successfully adapted to a 30-L pilot plant. The product of this synthesis is similar to the bench-top sample, which is also comparable to a ceramic MZFO standard. Through this work, we have demonstrated that the reverse micelle process is scalable to larger volumes.