Drying of pure silica powder -

SAIREM

Our customer, a French leader in high precision optical compounds, needed

to find a solution to dry ultra-pure silica powder, which is a very complex
product to process
Customer needs
As a leader in high precision optical compounds, our client is used to provide
high quality products for different industries.
The company needed to dry ultra-pure silica in order to manufacture high tech
optical systems used in products like the lenses of large telescopes, or optical
fibers.

Main constraints
The challenge of the drying process is to preserve the perfect purity of the
silica. To do so, the product must be dried in an air tight environment to protect
it from any atmospheric pollution or alteration. The question was how to dry
the product by evaporating the water it contains in a closed system?
The first solution that come to mind to solve the problem is to use filtered hot
air to heat and dry the silica powder. But this solution includes very expensive
filters that must be changed regularly. Moreover, the treated product is really
powdery once dried. That’s why SAIREM designed a custom microwave
solution to dry the powder.

Solution proposed
To solve the customer issue, SAIREM designed a custom microwave drying
system, completed by a polyamide container, which is transparent to
microwave, and a micro-porous lid that allows water to escape without letting
the ambient air come in and pollute the pure silica. Due to the slightly
aggressive nature of the atmosphere, our experts have designed a solution
fully protected with epoxy paint to limit corrosion.
The 915 MHz microwaves frequency was selected as this wavelength is
adapted to heat and dry large volumes of products homogeneously.
Key benefits
SAIREM’s engineers helped the client find the best solution to meet this
specific need. By using the homogeneous heating properties of the
microwaves, our equipment is able to heat dry the whole silica powder mass
from core to surface, without use of airflow or any potential pollution source.
We provided our customer a perfectly designed microwave drying system,
with a power of 50 kW, capable of removing 50 kg of water per hour and
reducing the humidity rate from 24% to less than 1%.