Population balance modeling for crystallization processes

Crystallization is a dynamic process that consists of various mechanisms such as nucleation, growth, aggregation and breakage. Population balance models (PBM) can be used to describe the behavior of crystallization processes. PBM is useful to determine the crystal size distributions in the crystall...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Author: Png, Marcus Kok Kwang.
Other Authors: Vinay Kumar Kariwala
Format: Final Year Project
Language:English
Published: 2009
Subjects:
Online Access:http://hdl.handle.net/10356/16516
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Institution: Nanyang Technological University
Language: English
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Summary:Crystallization is a dynamic process that consists of various mechanisms such as nucleation, growth, aggregation and breakage. Population balance models (PBM) can be used to describe the behavior of crystallization processes. PBM is useful to determine the crystal size distributions in the crystallization process to optimize the process and attain industrial specifications. PBM involves hyperbolic partial differential equations which often cannot be solved analytically. Thus, various numerical methods are employed to solve the model equations, often referred to as population balance equations (PBE). In this report, two numerical methods, the high resolution algorithm and hierarchical twotier algorithm, are evaluated and compared in terms of computational cost and accuracy. A commercial software package, Parsival, is also applied to a few case studies taken from literature. The numerical methods are shown to be superior to Parsival, while in most cases, the high resolution algorithm showed better performance as compared to the hierarchical two-tier algorithm. This serves as the motivation for future work in applying the high resolution method to more complex problems.