In industries such as pharmaceuticals, food, cosmetics, and coatings, the flow properties of materials are critical to ensuring product quality and process efficiency. Viscosity, a measure of a fluid’s resistance to flow, is a fundamental parameter in quality control. Traditionally, viscometer, such as the widely used viscometer, have been employed to measure viscosity.
Rare Earth Wars – China’s mineral Power Play Triggers a Global Scramble In recent months, China has tightened export controls on several heavy and medium rare earth elements, imposing a new licensing system that has slowed or paused shipments of samarium, terbium, dysprosium, and others. Beijing presents the move as a routine measure to safeguard strategic resources, whereas trading partners view it as a reminder of the world’s reliance on China’s processing capacity. The immediate result has been higher prices and lengthier lead‑times, prompting manufacturers from Europe to North America and across Asia to reassess inventories and diversify supply chains. China’s 25‑Year checkmate on critical minerals China’s latest restrictions did not come out of the blue – they are the culmination of decades of strategic planning. Over the last quarter-century, China methodically built up a domestic and global rare earth empire. It consolidated dozens of mines into six big state-run groups, mastered the dirty work of processing these metals, and invested in overseas deposits from Africa to Asia. Beijing now holds a stranglehold on rare earth supply chains, especially for the heavier, more specialized rare earths. By 2023, China was responsible for roughly 90% of the world’s refined rare earth
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Bridging the Gap: Scaling Up Wet Milling from Lab to Production Scaling up a wet milling process from a small laboratory setup to full-scale production is a notorious challenge in industries like ceramics, battery materials, and metal oxides. Many researchers and engineers have experienced the frustration of achieving a perfect powder particle size distribution (PSD) in the lab, only to see it deviate when the process is translated to the factory floor. In this article, we’ll explore why that happens and discuss the technology innovations enabling successful scale-up of wet milling – ensuring that powders milled at production scale have virtually the same PSD as those from the lab. We’ll focus on how recent breakthroughs allow us to map lab-scale controls to production conditions effectively, reducing trial-and-error and saving time and resources in the scale-up journey. The Challenge of Lab to Production Scale-Up in Wet Milling Wet milling (or wet grinding) is a process where particles are dispersed in a liquid and broken down via mechanical forces. It’s widely used to produce fine powders for ceramics (e.g. alumina, zirconia), battery electrodes (cathode and anode materials), and various oxides and pigments. Wet milling can achieve extremely fine particles with narrow size