3D Printing Micro Crystallizer Construction And Application

Conventional crystallizer applied in industrial application fail to meet demands from pharmacy industry due to its unprecise crystal controlling,lower repeatability and harder controllable.Meanwhile,the theoretical direction of crystal controlling just maintain as semiempirical theory,which is lack of mechanism research especially in crystal formation control owing to the shortage of precise crystallizer research.Therefore,brand-new micro crystallizers with highly precise and regular structure are urgently needed for crystal formation control and crystal formation mechanism research.Fabricated micro crystallizer usually involved in fabrication method,crystallization process and circumstance controlling.To achieve the crystallizer fabrication,micro structured surface must be handled first.Here,high resolution and flexible Digital Light Process 3D printer technology was invited with commercial photoresist resin PAA to fabricate micro crystallizer.By means of surface characteristic approach,the precision of 3D printer was measured as 500±20?m in xy axis and the influence of surface roughness can be omitted comparing with the size of formed nuclei.The result just supports the feasibility of 3D printing strategy.To realize crystallization application onto micro crystallizer,droplet evaporation crystallization process is chosen to investigate crystal formation mechanism and crystallizer characteristics.Since the concentration and nucleation barrier distributions play a key role in crystal formation,infinitesimal calculation method is employed here as unit-step based rotation volume method to calculate concentration distribution,then raised model is successfully examined by sodium urate to verify its functions in crystal explanation.Furthermore,precise crystal controlling,repeatability and controllable are considered as key items which need to be exhibited in developed crystallizer.NaCl,KCl,MgCl₂,and CuCl₂are chosen as target crystal series to investigate mentioned items.Firstly,take NaCl and KCl as examples,The explanations of crystal distribution,crystal form and crystal growing tendency were achieved by the influence of droplet inside circumstance involved by capillary flow from“coffee ring”theory.The final crystal distribution can be controlled from various distribution via concentration and confined micro structure,which is better than flat sheet in crystal control and repeatability;By using MgCl₂ crystal water in dome shape crystal tuning,crystal form repeatability was verified via 3×3 independent repeat experiments with similar conditions.In addition to the invitation CuCl₂ series and its characterized dendritic crystal formation,it could be tuned by micro crystallizer and illustrate the reason of dendritic crystal formation via evaporative crystallization mechanism.By means of the invited crystal series,developed micro crystallizer have achieved crystal form controllable,precise and repeatability verified by the crystal series invited in this work with mechanism explanation.It would be a new idea for further crystallizer design.Furthermore,the high function of crystal precise controlling could be achieved via micro structure crystallizer due to its product preservation and circumstance controlling.