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Sound turns solids into powder

April 24, 2003

The ancient alchemist's art of solvere et coagulare - dissolving and combining substances - evolved into an entire spectrum of modern processes. Grinding grain and baking bread are probably the most well-known. But it is not just in food processing technology, or in pharmaceuticals and the building materials industry that the condition of the ground materials used largely determine a product's pro-perties. This is because the propensity of a powder to coagulate into a solid with a new form increases with the fineness of its grains. Another important factor is that the size-reduction process influences the surface of the particles - activating them more or less. A machine uses pulsed sound to break up solids of all kinds to highly active powders.

How the machine produced by Krause-Hilger Maschinenbau GmbH works is explained by Walter Menzel, one of its inventors: "Our nanofractor incorporates contra-rotating disks which whiz round at almost the speed of sound. Several streamlined steel bodies mounted on the disks are shaped in such a way that they create a precisely defined pressure drop in the flow of air. If a pellet of the solid material enters its vicinity it is literally torn into pieces." The special feature of the process, on which a patent is pending, is that the pressure pulse is matched to the resonance frequency of the material that is to be broken up. The vibrations pulverize the material from the inside and increase the size of its surface, whereas grinding processes tend to squash and compress the particles. The nanofractor produces up to 500 kilograms of powder per hour at much lower energy consumption, achieving a grain size of less than one micrometer depending on the setting.

Slags from metal production or combustion processes, volcanic rock, filter ash from heat and power plants and other industrial waste can be size-reduced in this way and used in cement and other building materials. Thanks to their high activity they solidify quickly when mixed with water to form dense masses which can be used for example to seal dams and landfill sites. The firm of Artolith AG has already acquired a license to use the process for this application area. "We are now looking for other interested parties," states Dr. Dietrich Roscher from the Fraunhofer-Patent Center PST. "In particular we envisage interest from the chemical and pharmaceutical industry, producers of sintered materials and companies which process electronic scrap."

Fraunhofer-Gesellschaft

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