FIGURE 4 Dependence of a) CGand b) FLG size (identified by DLS) ontM .
The scale-up trials were conducted in home-made Teflon beakers
containing 0.5−5.0 L of aqueous liquids. Inner diameter of each beaker
was designed to achieve the desirable liquid volume (V ) when
the liquid height was set equal to the beaker diameter for elimination
of the possible geometry effect on shear mixing.50These trials produced as high as 1.15 g of FLG per batch with the
production rate (PR ) up to 0.86 g
h-1 (Figure 5). The fitting correlation ofPR = 0.23 × V 0.81allows one to reasonably predict that it may realize ~10
g h-1 of PR upon scale-up ofV = 100 L. To facilitate comparison among different studies,
the production rate per liquid volume (PR/V )
was adopted as a new criterion for evaluation of FLG production. A
detailed literature survey (SI: Section III) shows that 0.17 g
L-1 h-1 ofPR/V reached here by V = 5.0 L is
superior to most of those (1.2 × 10-4−9.78 g
L-1 h-1) achieved by sonication- and
shear-exfoliation with aqueous liquids and is the highest (1.6 ×
10-3−8.3 × 10-2 g
L-1 h-1) for V ≥ 5.0 L.
High efficiency of this FLG production method, i.e.VIB-co -VI-co -Py assisted shear exfoliation, is thus
demonstrated.