| 초록 |
About half a million tons of waste seashells from aquaculture of oysters, abalone, and mussles are generated every year in Korea alone. In spite of a lot of effort to utilize the waste seashells by the central and local governments, heaps of seashells occupy the local beaches next to the aquaculture plants. No practical large scale solution has been found to date for various reasons, and the waste seashells are sources of complaints by local residents. Seashells are made of millions of micrometer scale platelets. The stacked brick-and-mortar structure of platelets is known to be the reason for the super excellent mechanical properties of seashells. We have developed environmentally friendly processes to retrieve the platelets at ambient temperature without involving high temperature calcination. The retrieved platelets can find many applications. The retrieved platelets can be directly used as industrial calcium carbonate powder with high quality, high purity, and uniform size distribution. The purity of the retrieved platelets were better than reagent grade commercial calcium carbonate powder. We were also able to convert the retrieved platelets into calcium phosphate powder which can be used a raw material for dental and bone applications. For future applicatons, the retrieved platelets could be used as building blocks to make large area lacquer coated sheets if we could apply flat panel display process techniques to the platelets. Lastly, the platelets could be used for 3-D printing ink material. |
