How is ultrafine calcium carbonate powder produced?
How was ultrafine calcium carbonate powder developed?
Ultrafine calcium carbonate powder refers to calcium carbonate with primary particle sizes ranging from 0.02 to 0.1 μm. First developed in Japan, it is an inexpensive nanomaterial. Its unique quantum size effect, small-size effect, and surface effect give it distinct advantages over conventional powdered materials in terms of reinforcement, transparency, dispersibility, thixotropy, and leveling properties. In particular, active ultrafine calcium carbonate exhibits the characteristics of a functional filler, which significantly broadens its application scope and substantially enhances the performance and quality of products in related industries through its remarkable toughening and reinforcing effects.
What are the applications of ultrafine calcium carbonate powder? Let’s take a brief look at them together below.
Ultrafine calcium carbonate powder can be used as a filler in high-end cosmetics, soaps, facial cleansers, children’s toothpastes, and other daily chemical products. It is also an important component of culture media and an industrial calcium-source additive. As a buffering agent in microbial fermentation, it is employed in the production of antibiotics and exhibits certain pharmacological activities in analgesics and gastrointestinal medications.
What are the advantages of ultrafine calcium carbonate powder? Let’s take a brief look at them together below.
The better the wettability and reinforcing effect of calcium carbonate on rubber, the more pronounced these benefits are. Application studies have shown that, among ultrafine calcium carbonates with different crystal morphologies, chain-like ultrafine calcium carbonate exhibits the most effective reinforcement of rubber.
The plastics processing industry is one of the major consumers of ultrafine calcium carbonate powder in China and also represents a field where application technologies are relatively well established. Ultrafine calcium carbonate delivers significant benefits in terms of increasing the volume of plastic products, reducing costs, enhancing stability, hardness, and stiffness, improving processing performance, boosting heat resistance, refining optical clarity, enhancing scratch resistance and surface smoothness, toughening the material to improve notch impact resistance, and optimizing melt flow behavior during compounding.
Because fillers exhibit a synergistic effect on the opacity of titanium dioxide, cubic-crystal-form products generally have a low oil absorption value, whereas chain-like crystal-form products have a high oil absorption value. In plastic processing, plasticizers are typically used; if calcium carbonate has a high oil absorption value, it will also absorb a large amount of plasticizer, thereby degrading the processability of the plastic. For ultrafine calcium carbonate used as a filler in plastics, it is essential to select an appropriate surface treatment agent and corresponding activation method to enhance particle dispersion and prevent localized defects caused by secondary agglomeration. Due to particle agglomeration, the actual particle size of calcium carbonate products is much larger than that of the primary particles. Moreover, during plastic compounding, the mixing and shearing forces are limited, making it difficult to break up agglomerates, which inevitably leads to localized defects and results in poorer performance compared with ordinary precipitated calcium carbonate.
Ultrafine calcium carbonate powder is characterized by the ability to manually control its color, particle size, surface properties, dispersibility, rheological behavior, thixotropy, and crystal form. Moreover, it exhibits high chemical purity, strong chemical inertness, and excellent thermal stability, remaining undecomposed below 400°C. In addition, calcium carbonate boasts low oil absorption, low hardness, low abrasion, odorlessness, tastelessness, and superior dispersibility.
In addition, calcium carbonate boasts low oil absorption, low hardness, low abrasion, non-toxicity, odorlessness, tastelessness, and excellent dispersibility. Owing to these unique properties, ultrafine calcium carbonate powder is now widely used in China’s industrial and agricultural sectors, as well as in flue-gas desulfurization, water treatment, and other environmental protection technologies.
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