Dispersion Analysis and Materials Testing 2018
Conference Report: International Workshop
Extract from the full report by Dr.-Ing. Hildegard Lyko, free-lanced journalist
1. Introduction
This year, the Workshop clearly focussed on particle characterization and stability analysis. With 16 lectures announced, ..., participants had good opportunities to discuss the interesting results from testing materials by means of analytical centrifugation and gravity sedimentation. A large variety of application fields was covered ..., ranging from inorganic particles, bacteria cultures, dairy products, and fruit drinks to technical suspensions containing ceramic or organic particles as well as to emulsions for diverse industrial applications. Besides particle characterization and stability testing, the analytical instruments by LUM play a decisive role in the determination of filterability or in the optimization of production processes.
4. Young Scientist Awards
This year three nominees from German universities and one candidate from China had been nominated and invited to present their research at the workshop.
Sophie Kühne, from TU Bergakademie Freiberg, works on the agglomeration behaviour of emulsion slurries before and after cake filtration. Emulsion slurries are three-phase systems consisting of an emulsion with dispersed solid particles. Typical examples are oily sands, used pickling acids, media from liquid/liquid extraction processes or wastewater. Questions to be answered by filtration experiments and by using the LUMiSizer referred to the tendency of agglomeration of the two dispersed phases before and after filtration and the structure and flow resistance of the filter cake as well as the quality of the filtrate.
As the 2nd nominee Georg Surber,[TU Dresden] ... applied a LUMiSizer equipped with a near infrared light source to analyse the sedimentation behaviour of yoghurt-like stirred milk gels and curd-whey mixtures, which were produced in a lab-scale fermentation unit by adding different EPS producing starter cultures.
Wen Yong-zhu, from Master Kong Co. Ltd. Beverage IRD Center, gave an insight in his development work for the production of fruit and vegetable beverages.
Christian Ullmann, from Institute of Process Engineering and Environmental Technology at TU Dresden, was a member of the NanoDefine researchers group (www.nanodefine.eu). During this EU project different sample preparation and measuring technologies were evaluated with respect to their capability to clearly characterize particles according to the definition of nanomaterials, which was given by the European Commission: A material is considered to be a nanomaterial, if more than 50 % of the particles in the number-based particle size distributions have one or more external dimensions in the size range of 1 – 100 nm. In all, 18 materials were analysed by using 15 measurement techniques within the project [ ]. Mr. Ullmann reported on the comparison of four types of analytical centrifuges (LUMiSizer 610 with illumination at 470 nm and LUMiSizer 651 with illumination at 865 nm (NIR), a disc centrifuge and an analytical ultracentrifuge (AUC)) for characterizing a tri-modal polystyrene suspension (46, 100, and 350 nm) as model particle system and two grades of BaSO4 powders (one in the nano-range and one that also included larger particles, as real-world materials).
Christian Ullmann was awarded the LUM Young Scientist Award 2018 for his research work within the frame of the EU project NanoDefine.
The next, the 9th International Conference on Dispersion Analysis and Materials Testing will be held from 22-23 May 2019, in the year of the 25th foundation anniversary of LUM.