Wednesday, July 7, 2010

Screening spray-dried powder

I just finished screening the spray-dried powder. I opted out of using the 200 mesh as the yield for the powder I have would have been very low and it would have taken an insane amount of time. I don’t know what the largest particles are but much of it doesn’t pass a 6o mesh screen. I settled on using a 100 mesh screen instead. Even at this coarse resolution, I ended up recovering only about 1 liter of powder from about 20 liters of the original material. Of course if this works out, I will have the material sprayed at a much finer size which will yield much higher returns.

I’ve recently built a vibration machine for screening and used this to make the process more bearable. As the screen vibrates, I use a fine brush to move the material around, encouraging the finer stuff to pass through. I’m also mindful not to push too much as this will start to grind the granules which I obviously don’t want. When I was done, the result was quite shocking: the screened spray-dried powder is much denser than comparable powder, and as I was hoping, it doesn’t agglomerate. I can’t see why this won’t work, but I’ve been wrong too many times before to declare victory. We shall see.

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