Population Balance Discretization for Growth, Attrition, Aggregation, Breakage and Nucleation

BERTIN, DIEGO; COTABARREN, IVANA; PIÑA, JULIANA; BUCALA, VERONICA

COMPUTERS AND CHEMICAL ENGINEERING

PERGAMON-ELSEVIER SCIENCE LTD

Lugar: Amsterdam; Año: 2016 vol. 84 p. 132 - 150

0098-1354

This paper presents a new discretization method to solve one-dimensional population balance equations(PBE) for batch and unsteady/steady-state continuous perfectly mixed systems. The numerical techniqueis valid for any size change mechanism (i.e., growth, aggregation, attrition, breakage and nucleationoccurring alone or in combination) and different discretization grids.The developed strategy is based on the moving pivot technique of Kumar and Ramkrishna and thecell-average method of Kumar et al. A novel contribution is proposed to numerically handle the growthand attrition terms, for which a new representation of the number density function within each sizeclass is developed. This method allows describing the number particle fluxes through the class interfacesaccurately by preserving two sectional population moments.By comparing the numerical particle size distributions with analytical solutions of one-dimensionalPBEs (including different size change mechanisms and particle-size dependent kinetics), the accuracy ofthe proposed numerical method was proved.