POSTDOCTORAL POSITION: High-Throughput Continuous Automated Production of Noble Metal Nanoparticles Assisted By IA

State of the art

Reactive precipitation processes are key technologies for the fast development of new nano-materials (metals, ceramics, (bio)polymers…). Well-controlled process intensification approaches, based on microfluidics, are being recently developed at the laboratory scale, favouring more efficient and environmentally friendly manufacturing conditions. Microfluidics allows for high throughput, and increased reproducibility and yield through larger surface-to-volume ratios, and sub-millisecond mixing times which allow decoupling particle nucleation and early growth stages from mixing, Indeed, these approaches permit keeping a strict control over nanoparticles morphology and size distributions, promoting monodispersity and homogeneous properties otherwise difficult when using standard macroscopic batch synthesis methods.

However, scaling up microfluidics toward industrial conditions becomes essential to pave a way for a new generation of faster industrial processes with less environmental impact. In this sense, the industrial necessity of an automated control on particle production processes passes through online, in situ reaction characterization, and through the implementation of control loops, assuring product quality under non-ideal process conditions (perturbations of reagent flows, temperature variations, etc). Equally, industrial production necessities compel to an increase of production volumes by either millifluidic approaches or microfluidics multiple system parallelization.

Objectives

The objective of this work is to set up a technologically challenging proof of concept, of a high-throughput microfluidic/millifluidic reactor platform, transposable to other laboratories, for the continuous production of noble metal nanoparticles. The reactor operation will be governed by feedback control loops over defined input variables toward desired nanoparticle properties. Nanoparticle syntheses will be coupled to UV-Vis and other spectrometric techniques to interrogate the system and to acquire information regarding the state of reaction, which should eventually feed specific AI tools developed to improve the management of the experimental process.

Tasks

- Fabrication of the microfluidic systems in accordance to previously defined standards and setting up of micro-reactor platforms.

- Characterization of mixing efficiency and reactor performance as a function of non-symmetric reagent flow rates (Optical Microscopy, Fluorescence Microscopy, Raman confocal microscopy).

- Adaptation of reaction chemistry to the microfluidic environmental specifications.

- Definition of characteristic times of reaction and optimization of optical paths for UV-Vis probing

- Data analysis, including the creation of a spectral UV-Vis database linked to reaction conditions, electron microscopy nanoparticle characterization for population balance calculations, and application of AI tools to define feedback control loops on reaction parameters

- Articles and reports writing

- Managing the interactions among interdisciplinary skilled team members and also with external collaborations for IA implementations

References

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