(536a) A Revolutionary, Evolutionary Approach to Particle Characterisation

There exist a wide array of commercial powder characterisation tools capable of measuring a diverse assortment of bulk powder properties, such as flowability or cohesive index. Many of these properties are, however, purely heuristic and offer little physical insight into the micromechanical properties and behaviours of the materials characterised. This issue is troublesome not only in that it inhibits our understanding of particulate systems of interest, but also means that numerical models thereof (e.g. discrete element method simulations) which require details knowledge of powders' microscopic (particle-level) properties cannot be calibrated using commercially-available devices. While in academia researchers have created custom systems for the measurement of particle properties, these ad hoc approaches are not viable for industry.

Without proper calibration, DEM simulations are prone to being inaccurate, or even unphysical, thus preventing their widespread adoption in industry, where they otherwise stand to prove transformative to the design and optimisation of industrial particle-handling systems. In short, the lack of an efficient, effective manner for determining particles' micromechanical properties represents perhaps the most significant bottleneck in the industrial use of DEM, preventing the advent of a potentially paradigm-shifting move toward Industry 4.0 within the particle-handling industries.

The same evolutionary strategy may also be used to determine novel equations ... micro macro mapping