In the pilot plant section of the website, we talk about making specialist pilot plants for very hot processes or ones involving highly corrosive materials. Sometimes we produce them because the process proposed to be conducted is at too small a scale to be practical in our standard pilot plants. It is here that 3-D printing offers a solution.
Back in 2018, we blogged about the smallest ever production TORBED processor, a bench-sized reactor with an internal diameter of 50mm which is used to test carbon capture re-agents in a university laboratory. We’ve been putting our printer to the test again, this time producing a 300mm diameter TORBED processor to be used for test processing of various food powders.
Designed to present food powders to ultraviolet light, this process exploits the TORBED processors’ traditional strength of thorough mixing, ensuring that all the material is processed. We await the outcome of the tests with interest.