(70do) The Effect of Humidity on Granule Strength

The use of granulation as an agglomeration process within the chemical industry is currently growing, as companies move from the more traditional bulk, towards looking to bolster their traditional product lines with speciality chemicals. These chemicals usually have difficult processing and handling properties, which can be improved with the use of granulation, coating and other methods in order to achieve enhanced final product characteristics.

The process of granulation is however not well understood, being considered a chaotic system, where empiricism and rules of thumb dominate over scientific principles. There are however, a wide variety of techniques that can be used to control and understand the process, and what is happening throughout the course of a granulation batch.

In order to be able to efficiently control granulation, and provide repeatable granules of constant properties from a process the effect of all the expected variables on granulation must be elucidated. One of the perceived variables that has not received much attention in the past literature is humidity.

The results show that control of humidity both during and post granulation is important in determining the strength of the produced granules and their manufactured properties. Humidity was found to have significant effect of the size and strength characteristics of the granular product, an area which needs to be fully explained in order to fully control and understand granulation.