Transportation and storage solution
It’s no secret that manufacturers of various kinds of carbon nanomaterials in the overwhelming majority of cases produce them in the form of powders. This, by the way, concerns not only carbon nanomaterials, but also fine and ultra-dispersed carbon materials in general (if we do not consider the case of pressed carbon electrodes, nonwoven materials such as coal mats and briquetted coal).
End consumers, in the absence of a direct alternative, are forced to purchase precisely powdered carbon nanotubes of various structures, as well as intercalated graphite, graphene, fullerenes, and so on. Such an approach on the part of manufacturers in relation to end consumers leads to a fairly large number of problems that the consumer has to solve.
The first problem is the problem of sane transportation. Usually, carbon nanomaterials have a very low bulk density and, accordingly, even small amounts of mass take up a decent volume during transportation, although mainly air is transported.
Another problem of transportation and storage is the problem of caking of carbon materials. Over time, under the influence of external conditions and gravity, materials can clump and exfoliate, which leads to the need for their preliminary processing before their possible use on various types of grinding devices such as ball mills.
And other problem of transportation and storage is the hydrophilicity of carbon nanostructures. It is clear that the resulting carbon structures are initially contaminated with impurities and, in essence, are hydrophobic, but with subsequent cleaning and pre-sale processing, they almost always acquire the unpleasant property of absorbing moisture from the environment, any of which, again, leads to agglomeration of structures and their contamination and the need, for example, their additional heat treatment. Well, either transportation and storage in a vacuum, which does not add joy to the end consumer.
There is also an “ecological” aspect of transportation and storage — powdered carbon nanomaterials of any nature are very well planted both on various surfaces and in the human body, and although the harm from carbon nanomaterials for health has not yet been scientifically proven, powders in unsealed packaging account for work using at least personal protective equipment.
Well, for complete happiness, it is worth noting that the end consumers, for the most part, the powder as such is absolutely not interesting. It is extremely reluctant to fit into existing technological processes, mainly due to its dislike of natural dispersion in most technological environments, which, in turn, leads to the need for forced dispersion directly in production and entails additional costs, in some cases even a change familiar production chains.
A possible solution, which would suit the majority of consumers, would be a solution for the purchase, transportation, storage and use of carbon nanomaterials in the form of suspensions or colloidal solutions.
However, this is not without problems.
The main problem is the problem of dispersion of powdered carbon materials in various liquid media. The currently used methods — from simple mixing to ultrasonic dispersion — do not give acceptable results in terms of the homogeneity of the mixtures obtained, even with the use of specialized surfactants (which, for the most part, are complex organic structures and simply fall apart during dispersion and do not give the desired effect ).
From this problem arises the next one — the problem of stability of suspensions and colloidal media obtained in this way. In the overwhelming majority of cases, such media are sedimentation unstable and short-lived, which prevents their long-term storage and successful use by the end user.
In preparation for the implementation of the ARNO Token project (www.arno-token.com), our team designed, manufactured and tested a specialized device for obtaining superstable colloidal solutions and suspensions — a hydrodynamic cavitation disperser (see photo).
Although the equipment we have developed has a laboratory-applied nature, with its help, nevertheless, it is possible to process and obtain sufficiently large amounts (up to 1 ton per hour) of suspensions or colloidal media (depending on the medium in which dispersion occurs) with incredible high stability (up to a year at concentrations up to 20 grams / liter) and uniformity.
Thus, our team, while still in laboratory conditions, has created all the prerequisites for meeting the needs of end users and their use of carbon nanomaterials in industrial processes without changing production flow sheets and unnecessary costs.
Yours faithfully
ARNO Token Team
