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Particulate Process and Product Design
Heather Emady, Rutgers University
Department of Chemical and Biochemical Engineering
Monday, January 27, 2014
10:30 a.m.
Goldwater (GWC) 487 [map]
abstract
Granular/particulate materials are common in our everyday lives, and their processing consumes ~10% of the world’s energy. Despite their extensive use as well as economic and environmental impacts, far
fewer engineering and design principles exist for particulates than for their liquid and gas counterparts. The majority of particulate process models are highly empirical, and therefore cannot be widely applied to different formulations (feed materials) with varying properties (e.g., particle size and size distribution, shape). Typically, costly lab-scale and pilot-scale studies must be carried out for each new formulation and equipment design, and difficulties still arise when scaling-up to full manufacturing. Therefore, understanding these materials and optimizing the processes through which they are manufactured has the potential to significantly reduce economic and environmental impacts. Many industries, including pharmaceuticals, food, agricultural chemicals, detergents, catalysts, and consumer products, manufacture a variety of products from particulate materials. Product or intermediate specifications may include size, size distribution, shape, strength, porosity, and content uniformity of particles or of particulate-based delivery forms. The aim of this work is to design particulate products and processes through the study of fundamental phenomena involved in particle-particle, particle-fluid, and particle-equipment interactions to produce required product specifications. By working backwards from the desired end product attributes, this multiscale design approach covers the entire sequence of raw feed formulation handling through equipment processing to the final granular product. This talk will highlight two studies involving particulate process and product design. The first will focus on wet granulation, which is the process of adding a liquid to a fine powder for size enlargement. Granulation of powders prevents dusting, improves flowability, and prevents segregation. Here, we focus on nucleation-only wet granulation, where one liquid drop forms one larger agglomerated particle (i.e., granule). Experiments utilizing high-speed video imaging of single drops dropping into powder beds led to the discovery of the fundamental phenomena of the mechanisms by which granules are formed, resulting in a regime map that can predict the mechanism and corresponding granule shape based on a few key dimensionless groups involving material and process parameters. The second study will focus on the scale-up of heat transfer in rotary calciners via discrete element method simulations. Calcination involves heating particles or powders to a high temperature in order to achieve chemical and physical changes. Here, three relevant heating time scales for rotary calciners are identified and a scale-up rule is
proposed.
biosketch
Heather Emady received her B.S. in Chemical Engineering from the University of Arizona in May 2007. She completed her Ph.D. in Chemical Engineering from Purdue University in May 2012. After finishing at Purdue, Heather did postdoctoral work at Procter and Gamble in Cincinnati, Ohio. In 2013, she joined Rutgers University, where she is currently a postdoctoral researcher. Her research
interests include particulate process and product design, granulation, granular flow and heat transfer, soft matter, and complex fluids.
