Our partners from CNR, PLUMESTARS and FINCERAMICA have just published a new paper in the Special Issue of the Journal Crystals. In the article, the CUPIDO team applies a promising nanoparticles production process that might improve the reproducibility of conditions from laboratory to industrial scale.
The Calcium phosphate nanoparticles (CaP NPs) used in CUPIDO are an efficient class of nanomaterials mainly used for biomedical applications but also very promising in other sectors such as cosmetics, catalysis, water remediation, and agriculture. Unfortunately, as in the case of other nanomaterials, their wide application is hindered by the difficulty to control features like size, morphology, purity and degree of particle aggregation.
In this paper, the authors apply a method known as continuous flow precipitation, where reactants are continuously mixed, and the precipitated NPs are quickly collected and removed from the reactor. Although the setup of the process is more complicated than other traditional methods, it can provide homogenous reaction conditions and a more reproducible synthesis; thus, becoming a very promising technique for the industrial production of CaP NPs for biomedical application. However, it requires a thorough optimization in which several factors should be taken into account simultaneously to understand their influences on the process and the chemico-physical properties of the final material.
In this paper, the CUPIDO team describes a novel, simple and scalable synthesis of the CUPIDO CaP NPs by means of the continuous flow process. The related statistical analysis provides a deeper understanding of the relationships between reaction process factors and CaP NP properties and is a relevant contribution to the scale-up production of CaP NPs for nanomedical or other applications.
The paper is available online as open access at this link: https://www.mdpi.com/2073-4352/10/10/953
