Details of Grant 

EPSRC Reference:	EP/C511301/1
Title:	Multi-Scale Population-Balance Modelling & Control of Granulation Processes
Principal Investigator:	Immanuel, Dr CD
Other Investigators:	Stepanek, Professor F
Researcher Co-Investigators:
Project Partners:	Sustainable Minerals Institute, The Univ University of California, Santa Barbara
Department:	Chemical Engineering
Organisation:	Imperial College London
Scheme:	Standard Research (Pre-FEC)
Starts:	03 October 2005	Ends:	02 October 2008	Value (£):	87,353
EPSRC Research Topic Classifications:	Particle Technology
EPSRC Industrial Sector Classifications:	Chemicals Food and Drink Pharmaceuticals and Biotechnology
Related Grants:
Panel History:
Summary on Grant Application Form
Particulate processes are widely encountered in process industries such as minerals, fertilisers, pharmaceuticals, food products and chemicals. It is estimated that, in the chemical industry alone, 60% of the products are manufactured as particulates with a further 20% involving some form of solid handling. Granulation is a key step in many particulate processes, often used to improve the flowability of the materials, reduce dustiness, and to co-mix materials that would otherwise segregate. Many continuous granulation plants operate well below the design capacity, suffering from high recycle rates, and even instabilities induced by disturbance amplification effects. Thus, there is an immediate economic incentive for better understanding and for effective operation and control of continuous granulation units. Likewise, the pharmaceutical industry employs batch granulation units to produce commodity products wherein it is imperative for rapid scale-up of operation. Further, advanced control necessitates targeting the entire granule particle size distribution (PSD) for control rather than the control of an average granule size. This is motivated by the correlation of the PSD with several enduse properties covering various process industries, including delivery rates of drugs/fertilisers/detergents, taste of food products etc.Despite its economical importance, granulation operation, like most solid handling operations, continues to be ill-understood and dependent on prevalent customs and practice for day-to-day operation. The biggest challenge until a few years ago was the very limited knowledge on the process mechanisms. From the operational perspective, the sparsity in the available manipulated variables poses challenges for efficient operation and effective control. A fundamental model-based strategy is inevitable for granulation processes, with population balances providing a natural framework to model the underlying mesoscopic processes. This is aided by recent advances in process understanding and measurement technology.Granulation is a complex multi-scale process, covering a wide range of number, dimension and time scales. Although population balance modelling efforts abound in granulation, the current one-dimensional population balance models have been found inadequate, with the plant-model mismatches being attributed to the following factors: The simpler population balance equation (PBE) model with fixed structure conventionally used for granulation processes cannot fully represent multi-stage granulation processes including the underlying micro- and meso-scale phenomena. Non-ideality effects such as mixing and segregation, and liquid mal-distribution become criticalThe proposed study aims to develop a multi-dimensional and multi-scale PBE model for granulation processes, accounting for the macroscopic environmental non-idealities, and to employ the model for efficient operation and effective advanced control studies. The proposed study will exploit the multi-scale character and the inherent hierarchy in the process (as opposed to proposing strategies to overcome the same)
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