(195b) Designer Particles: Mechanistic Understanding for Process Design

Particle-liquid and particle-particle interactions are fundamental to a huge range of industrial manufacturing processes, including granulation, coating, drying, and fluidized bed processes. These processes are critical to a wide range of industries, including foods, pharmaceuticals, consumer products, battery manufacture and many more. There exists a considerable, but incomplete, body of understanding of the nano- and micro- scale interactions between particles and particles, and particles and fluids. However, the ability to use this considerable knowledge to predict process performance, to design manufacturing processes, and to design particulate products to give desired performance is generally still considered a research exercise, and industry is often still reliant on substantial experimental trial and error approaches to product and process design.

This talk focuses on two quite different operations: spherical agglomeration, and power coating in tumbling drums. Despite the differences in industrial application and equipment, fundamentally very similar rate processes are occurring at the interfaces between these particles and fluids. In this presentation, both experimental and computational work targeted to identify and quantify mechanisms of these processes will be shown, and the impact of these results on future designer particles and the associated manufacturing processes for these particles will be explored.