Population Balance Modelling of Pan Granulation Processes

Pan granulation is a particle formation process with widespread practical applications such as fertilizer and pharmaceutical manufacturing. The continuous operation mode is especially promising with respect to industrial demands. For process automation and intensification, a suitable dynamical process model is required. Therefore, the focus of this contribution is on identification of agglomeration kernel parameters in a population balance model based on empirical data. To this end, an objective functional, representing the error between model and measurement data, is minimized. It is shown that the steady state particle size distribution of a lab-scale process can be reproduced accurately using the population balance with the identified parameters.