Aection – Automatic EHDA Control and Mode Recognition.

Electrohydrodynamic Atomization (EHDA), also known as Electrospray (ES), is a technology which uses strong electric fields to manipulate liquid atomization. Among many other areas, electrospray is currently used as an important tool for biomedical applications (droplet encapsulation), water technology (thermal desalination and metal recovery) and material sciences (nanofibers and nano spheres fabrication, metal recovery, selective membranes and batteries). A complete review about the particularities of this technology and its applications was recently published in a special edition of the Journal of Aerosol Sciences [1]. Even though EHDA is already applied in many different industrial processes, there are not many controlling tools commercially available which can be used to remotely operate the system as well as identify some spray characteristics, e.g. droplet size, operational mode, droplet production ratio. The AECTion project proposes the development of an innovative controlling system based on the electrospray current, signal processing & control and artificial intelligence to build a non-visual tool to control and characterize EHDA processes.