Upscaled, Industrial In-Line Monitoring of Nanoparticle Synthesis by Turbidity Measurement and Transferable Chemometric Modeling

An industrial system, based on a probe for turbidity measurement and a model, has been developed and tested for the in-line monitoring of nanoparticle synthesis reactions, thus providing information on the reaction progress and particle size. Real-time turbidity measurements, reliably indicating the reaction end and allowing run-time variations to be detected, were obtained for three silica nanoparticle syntheses. The system, initially built for a research laboratory reactor of 6 L, was successfully upscaled to an industrial 160 L reactor, simply by adapting the probe’s mounting components. In a further upscaling process, transferability of the model from the smaller to the larger reactor, giving accurate particle size predictions, was achieved. In addition, a combined model, developed from the first two reactions, predicted the particle size in the third reaction without first needing to obtain any data for the model from this reaction. The combined model’s predictions showed an average relative error of 18% with respect to the measured particle size. The probe was resistant to harsh reaction conditions at a temperature of 90 °C with concentrated acids, making the system potentially useful in industrial nanoparticle production.