DisplayTitle

Agglomeration or granulation is a common unit operation to enhance the product characteristics such as flowability, bulk density, physical appearance, and to minimize dust and segregation. It is broadly used across many industries ranging from pharmaceuticals to agriculture, consumer goods (detergent and food) and fertilizers. During wet granulation, a liquid binder is added to a dry powder formulation to produce larger agglomerates. Wet granulation involves three rate processes, nucleation, consolidation and growth, breakage and attrition, all taking place simultaneously. Consequently, this makes it a very complex process to control. These different rate processes contribute to the generation of the agglomerate attributes, such as size distribution, density, and liquid distribution. Researchers have been putting effort to better understand the existing processes to be able to produce the granules with the desired attributes. This talk will focus on the current collective understanding of the rate processes; how to use the state of the art modeling approaches and different quantitative engineering approaches to design, troubleshoot and scale-up agglomeration processes.