Population balance modeling for crystallization processes

• Main Author: Png, Marcus Kok Kwang.
• Other Authors: Vinay Kumar Kariwala
• Format: Final Year Project
• Language: English
• Published: 2009
• Subjects: DRNTU::Engineering::Chemical engineering::Chemical processes
• Online Access: http://hdl.handle.net/10356/16516
• Institution: Nanyang Technological University

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.