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Engineers at Oregon State University have discovered a new method to speed the production rate of nanoparticles by 500 times, an advance that could play an important role in making nanotechnology products more commercially practical.
The approach uses an arrayed microchannel reactor and a "laminated architecture" in which many sheets, each with thousands of microchannels in them, are stacked in parallel to provide a high volume of production and excellent control of the processes involved.
The new approach created by a research team of five engineers at OSU used a microreactor with the new architecture that produced "undecagold nanoclusters" hundreds of times faster than conventional "batch synthesis" processes that might have been used.
This research, Chang said, created nanoparticles based on gold, but the same concept should be applicable to other materials as well. By lowering the cost of production, even the gold nanoclusters may find applications, he said, because the cost of the gold needed to make them is actually just a tiny fraction of the overall cost of the finished product.