Rapid synthesis of nanopowders in high energy ball milling; Optimization of milling parameters

Abstract An important factor in high energy ball milling process is to speed up the synthesis of metal/ceramic nanocomposites. In this work, for the first time, particle swarm optimization (PSO) as a new powerful algorithm was used for optimization of milling parameters in order to minimize the synthesis time of metal/ceramic nanocomposites in planetary mills. Accordingly, it is important to find a mathematical model to correlate the milling parameters with the synthesis time of metal/ceramic nanocomposites and then optimize the mentioned model. In this work, Burgio׳s mathematical model was chosen because it describes the energy supplied by a planetary mill using only analytical expressions. Based on Burgio׳s model eight design parameters in milling, namely, number of balls, ball diameter, vial radius, vial height, ball diameter distribution coefficient, plate spinning rate, vial spinning rate and distance between the center of the plate and the center of the vial, were optimized by the PSO algorithm. By optimizing the milling parameters and given the Burgio model, the synthesis time was minimized. At the end two test cases were solved to demonstrate the effectiveness and accuracy of the proposed design. Computational results showed that the proposed optimization algorithm is quite effective and powerful in optimizing the planetary mills to speed up the metal/ceramic nanocomposites synthesis.