Deagglomeration technologies are often used for mass production of nano-sized particles for wide range of industries including chemical, pharmaceutical, food, agro, pigments, paint, lacquer, paper, plastics, ceramics, etc. However, production of nano-sized particles is very challenging due to the extremely complex physical and chemical phenomena that interact at macro, meso, micro and nano scales. In stirred media mills, for example, the macroscopic process conditions must be carefully designed to achieve beneficial multi-body impacts of grinding media at meso level, which trigger hydrodynamic contact forces at micro-scale that eventually cause agglomerate breakage producing nano-sized particles. These Multi-body, Multi-scale, Multi-Phase, Multi-field and Multi-objective (M5) interactions are implicit and strongly interdependent.
C3M participates in FP6 project PROFORM which is aimed at the development of next generation of process tools and methodologies for the design and production of products containing nano-particles in a highly dispersed, functional and stable state.