I am working since a while on the synthesis of silver nanoparticles using plant leaf extracts as other researchers along the world and I succeeded on this at lab scale. but I am interested now on exploring the possibility of the method being adopted at large scale and the economic feasibility of such adaption compared with the already established silver nanoparticles market providing large scale chemical and physical techniques?
Some work has already been reported on the GREEN synthesis of NP.
Pls find below two references whose first authors- • Siavash Iravani [Ist paper] and P. Ramesh[2nd paper] are our worthy RG colleagues.
The abstracts for both these papers are available in RG and you can search them under their names.
[A]Green synthesis of metal nanoparticles using plants
• Siavash Iravani
Green Chemistry . 01/2011; 13:2638-2650. DOI: 10.1039/C1GC15386B
[B]Green Syntheis of Zinc Oxide Nanoparticles Using Flower Extract Cassia Auriculata
P Ramesh, A Rajendran , M Meenakshisundaram
Journal of NanoScience and NanoTechnology 2279-0381 02/2014; 2(1):Pp 41-45.
As a co-author on the first papers regarding plant based synthesis of nanoiron particles, my co-authors have also made and published methods for synthesis of plant based nanosilver particles I have also made nanosilver particles extensively in the lab. I have made up to 1000 L batch sizes of plant extract based nanoiron particles at a full-scale. After synthesis, we actually dilute the nanoiron suspension prior to use as a catalyst. For your application, if you wanted to concentrate the nanosilver particles, then there clearly would be additional unit operations necessary and I have not looked into the economics of those unit operations. As far as the full scale synthesis of nanosilver particles, I do not think that this would be a problem based on our large scale plant-based nanoiron work.
The answer on your question requires more detailed information about the process of synthesis of NP (the speed of the process, the particle size, the output of the reduction reaction, the silver NP surface stabilization etc.). Sometimes one can do it very quickly and easily in the laboratory, but the development of industrial technology requires much more efforts and expenses. Very often, the duration of such work far exceeds the time spent on researches. I have one doubt in the success of such process in industry. The industrial technology usually requires strict compliance with all the conditions of synthesis (constancy of the chemical composition of the reactants and their concentrations). I am not an expert in the biology of plants and do not know whether they can meet these requirements.
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