Clifford Yi-der Tai

Biography

Emeritus Professor at NTU.

Research Interest

Synthesis of Nanoparticles Crystallization and supercritical fluid technologies are the two main research areas in our laboratory. Crystallization is an energy-saving operation to produce powders that meets specifications, including particle size distribution, crystal habit, and purity. The crystallization technology has been applied to almost every industry. On the other hand, supercritical fluid technology, which has been applied to the food and fine chemicals industry, has a distinct feature of low pollution, and thus will become an important technology in the chemical industry. Some of the research topics in our laboratory are described below. Synthesis of Nanoparticles Some unexpected results were obtained by using the two-step growth model to analyze the crystallization data: (1) The mass-transfer coefficient is a constant for a system when a fluidized-bed crystallizer is operated near the terminal velocity of the crystal; (2) Impurity would affect the kinetic order of the surface-reaction step, (3) Interfacial Supersaturation is an important factor to influence the secondary nucleation rate. Nanoparticle possesses distinct properties so that its synthesis is one of the most important topics in material science. In our lab, reverse emulsion and high-grarity techniques are developed for producing spherical ZrO2 particles and calcium carbonate of various shapes with the mean size ranging from tens of nanometers to a few micrometers.