(281e) Simplifying the Population Balance for Teaching Kinetics & Contactor Design in Particle Processing

In the paper presented at this meeting titled “Mapping the General 1-D Population Balance Solution Space”, a unified scaling for the population balance was presented which allows identification of the following for all possible combinations of accretional growth, collisional growth and breakage given power-law rate kernels and self-similar fragments:

• A scaled time variable from which the characteristic time for the system can be extracted
• Reduced equations for evolution of the scaled number mean particle volume
• Scaled mean particle size trajectories that depend only on kernel order
• Expressions for the scaled moments of the size distributions for the long-time attractor of the system (either stationary state or similarity solution)

This paper presents examples of size-evolution trajectory dependence on kernel order which may be used to extract rate parameters from data (the inverse problem) or for designing ideal contactor systems given a knowledge of the rate parameters. The trajectory dependence on kernel order is shown to be analogous to a reaction trajectory’s dependence on reaction order. Thus, this approach is a step toward the Hounslow program which called for teaching Particle Technology like Reaction Engineering