Influence of polydispersity and breakage on stochastic simulations of spray fluidized bed agglomeration

Abstract

Monte Carlo (MC) model is a stochastic and discrete method to enhance the understating of spray fluidized bed (SFB) agglomeration in the field of food, chemical and pharmaceutical industry. Previous studies focused on agglomerates composed of monodisperse primary particles. Size dispersity of primary particles is, though, an important aspect to fully assess the morphological features of an agglomerate. In the current work, a polydisperse tunable aggregation model is therefore developed. The radius of gyration, porosity, surface area and agglomeration rate increase with primary particle dispersity. Furthermore, the breakage of already formed agglomerates is introduced in the MC model. The influence of breakage decreases the overall growth rate and the arithmetic mean diameter of the particle size distribution by around 11%. The overall growth rate and the diameter of agglomerates with a similar number of primary particles increase with decreasing temperature of fluidization gas and increasing mass fraction of binder.