Intertronics advance the cause of vacuum mixing

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25th March 2009

Source: Intertronics

Intertronics advance the cause of vacuum mixing

You would have thought that air-free mixing would be a simple process – wouldn’t you? But at the laboratory or small production level it was often not the case – until those clever people at Intertronics saw the need and brought us the Thinky Mixer. The original Thinky ARE250 featured a planetary motion mixing process that by the simple expedient of not enfolding air, often completely removed the need to extract air later. The 250 has now been joined by the ARV310 and the larger capacity ARV5000, both of which have the facility to mix within a vacuum so that even micro-bubbles may be eliminated.

This has been found to be vital in many medical, pharmaceutical, electronic and nano-technology areas where complete homogeneity is needed to ensure optimum performance. Known difficult to mix substances such as nano-particles with highly viscous liquids, powders, pastes, putties to the point of near solids – are all simple stuff to the non-contact Thinky process. This includes such materials as alginic acid, carbon nano-tubes, nano-ceramics, acrinol with zinc oxide, hyaluronic acid, hydroquinone, alumina and epoxy, silver pastes and solder pastes.

The ARV310 is a desktop unit with capacity of 250ml in vacuum, while its big brother, ARV5000, is a stand-alone unit that will mix up to 3 litres in vacuum. Explained Intertronics’ M.D. Peter Swanson: “One of the issues with manual degassing (placing the material in a chamber and apply vacuum, often multiple times) is that it takes time and attention. Applying too much vacuum can cause the volatiles in the material to ‘boil’ out, and if you are not careful, the material can foam up and even overflow the container. These new Thinky machines make it an automatic one step process without any danger of material overflow. Not only do they mix without any air bubbles – even micro bubbles – they are gentle with organic or other fragile material since the mixing shear forces are spread throughout the mix, rather than focussed on a mechanical blade or other invasive tool.”

Over and above the unique mixing performance, the ARV310 and 5000 take just seconds to minutes, eliminate cleaning/cross-contamination and process from 0.5ml upward.

Peter Swanson enthused that, “The sheer genius of the Thinky process is that it translates so simply into equipment that is quick and easy to use in almost every industrial laboratory or production area.”

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