FIGURE 4 Dependence of a) CGand b) FLG size (identified by DLS) ontM .
The scale-up trials were conducted in home-made Teflon beakers containing 0.5−5.0 L of aqueous liquids. Inner diameter of each beaker was designed to achieve the desirable liquid volume (V ) when the liquid height was set equal to the beaker diameter for elimination of the possible geometry effect on shear mixing.50These trials produced as high as 1.15 g of FLG per batch with the production rate (PR ) up to 0.86 g h-1 (Figure 5). The fitting correlation ofPR = 0.23 × V 0.81allows one to reasonably predict that it may realize ~10 g h-1 of PR upon scale-up ofV = 100 L. To facilitate comparison among different studies, the production rate per liquid volume (PR/V ) was adopted as a new criterion for evaluation of FLG production. A detailed literature survey (SI: Section III) shows that 0.17 g L-1 h-1 ofPR/V reached here by V = 5.0 L is superior to most of those (1.2 × 10-4−9.78 g L-1 h-1) achieved by sonication- and shear-exfoliation with aqueous liquids and is the highest (1.6 × 10-3−8.3 × 10-2 g L-1 h-1) for V ≥ 5.0 L. High efficiency of this FLG production method, i.e.VIB-co -VI-co -Py assisted shear exfoliation, is thus demonstrated.