Anti-microbial coating production facility design and quality control

• Autor(a) principal: Mendes, Daniel Andrade
• Data de Publicação: 2022
• Tipo de documento: Dissertação
• Idioma: eng
• Título da fonte: Repositório Científico de Acesso Aberto de Portugal (Repositórios Cientìficos)
• Texto Completo: http://hdl.handle.net/10362/132742
• topic: Anti-microbial coating; Production facility design; Quality control; Domínio/Área Científica::Engenharia e Tecnologia::Engenharia Química

Microorganisms such as bacteria, viruses and fungus are important in human health and culture in many ways, from microbes that live in the digestive tracts of humans, to serving to ferment food and treat swage. However, pathogen microbes are very dangerous as they cause several infectious diseases such as COVID-19. Pathogen microorganisms can remain viable on surfaces for long periods of time, making contaminated surfaces a dangerous transmission vector for the spreading of infectious diseases. To prevent this from happening, anti-microbial coatings are being developed to adhere to many different types of material surfaces, granting them an anti-microbial property and help stop the spreading of infectious diseases. This project focuses on the scale-up, planning and designing of an anti-microbial coating production facility, developed by Smart Separations. This facility will be prepared to produce 500 Kg of coating per day and will have the capability of performing quality control testing in-site. An economic analysis for this facility design was performed, in which a net present value of 2.9 million euros after 8 years resulted, as well as a return of investment period of about two and a half years. The experimental part of this project aims at tackling two problems that emerge from the scaling-up of the process. The excess foam generated during production, and the difficulty of measurement of the quality of the final product. For the former, an anti-foaming agent addition to the process was studied, and for the latter a quality control sensitivity analysis was performed