IHTZ (Engineering Chemical and Technological Center)

History

2025: Silica Gel Powder Production Launch

Tomsk State University (TSU) and the Engineering Chemical and Technological Center (IHTZ) launched the first production of powdered silica gel in Russia for the cosmetic industry. This became known in early March 2025. An experimental batch of domestic silica gel, which is not inferior in quality to foreign counterparts, has already been sent to Russian enterprises.

According to the press service of Tomsk State University, under the conditions of sanctions, Russian manufacturers of toothpaste and cosmetics faced a shortage of powdered silica gel - a mandatory component that provides hygienic products with the necessary consistency and cleaning properties. Before the imposition of sanctions, most of these raw materials were supplied from abroad, mainly from Germany, and products from China often did not meet the requirements of manufacturers.

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Фото: Freepik

Vladislav Kalashnikov, a technologist of the project to scale the production of silica gel, a master's student of the Digital Chemistry program of the TSU Faculty of Chemistry, noted that the request for silica gel for toothpastes alone is at least 5 thousand tons per year, not counting other areas of its application.

The scaling process from the laboratory variant to the reactor synthesis took about a year. The main difficulty was that when increasing the size of the apparatus and switching to industrial production, there were problems with ensuring heating, mixing, the rate of supply of substances to the reaction zone and other factors affecting the quality of the product.

The technology was piloted under the guidance of developers - scientists of the research laboratory of porous materials and sorption of the chemical faculty of TSU, headed by the head of the laboratory Grigory Mamontov. Technologists were engaged in the selection of equipment, the compilation of material balances, process charts and the implementation of measures that make it possible to obtain products of proper quality.^[1]

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