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| Company | Products | Technology | Services | Inquiries | Information |
| Introduction |
| JetCutter |
| LentiKats® |
| Conventionals |
One of the major problems in encapsulation technology is the large
scale production of uniform beads from viscous
fluids at high throughput. This problem is addressed by our novel JetCutter Technology.
Bead generation is achieved by cutting a solid jet of fluid coming out of a nozzle by means of rotating cutting wires into cylindrical segments which then form beads due to surface tension on their way to a hardening device.
Since the velocity of the fluid and the speed of the cutting tool are kept constantly the produced beads show a very narrow distribution of particle size. The JetCutter offers a huge field of possible applications since it is suitable for production of beads with a wide range of size. The diameter of the particles that have been produced yet by the JetCutter ranges from about 120 µm to moter than 3 mm. Moreover a great variety of fluids can be processed to beads since the viscosity of the workable fluid is only limited by the pressure drop in the nozzle that has to be applied e.g. by a pump or a pressure vessel. Fluids with high viscosities can be processed to beads with our machines - even syrupy or paste-like fluids can be worked with. We successfully processed concentrated alginate polymer solution with a viscosity of more than 110 Pa·s (110,000 cps) to uniform particles of less than 1 mm in diameter! The lower limit for viscosity is about 0.2 Pa·s but depends on the fluid used. A variety of fluids have successfully been tested with the JetCutter so far:
Beads were prepared with a large variety of encapsulated materials like amino acids, vitamins and other food-ingredients, fragrances, flavours, oils, pigments, bacteria, fungi, enzymes, inorganic powders (kaolin, TiO2, magnetite, colloids).
Another very important feature of the JetCutter is its high productivity and its capability for being scaled up. Our JetCutter apparatus is capable of generating up to 13,000 beads per second at each nozzle! When using a production frequency of 8,000 beads per second, which means that the jet is cut 8,000 times a second, 15 litres of droplets of 1.0 mm in diameter are generated per hour for each nozzle. The following table gives the productivities for two different frequencies of bead generation (5,000 and 10,000 Hz). The theoretical productivities are given per nozzle and thus can be multiplied for using a multi-nozzle system. The figures are given in kg/(h · nozzle) with a density for the fluid of 1 kg/L.
Cutting the polymer jet causes a cutting loss that on principle can be recycled and used again. An additional spraying loss resulting from diagonal cutting of the jet can be prevented by inclining the cutting plane. This is illustrated by the following figure.
We offer a special software, "BeadSim", to calculate the optimal inclination angle for a given bead formation process to reduce the cutting losses to a minimum. Further reduction of fluid losses can be achieved by application of extremely thin wires for the cutting tool. By using thin cables less than 100 µm in diameter the losses can be reduced to less than 2 %.
geniaLab® offers complete service around the JetCutter Technology:
You are welcome to test your material(s) in our lab. To evaluate the principle compatibility of your materials with our technology we suggest to send a sample in advance so we can have a closer look. Once we are convinced that your material is workable we will demonstrate the technology to your own eyes. Use the appropriate inquiry form to enable us to discuss details with you and fix a date for your trials. Depending on the efforts necessary we have to charge for the lab-time and the involved staff. However, any work that we have to charge for, is discussed with you in detail before we start.
Current Developments and Future Trends geniaLab® is working on the following tasks:
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