Novel semibatch supersaturation control approach for the cooling crystallization of heat‐sensitive materials

Abstract

AbstractThis article introduces the application of a novel supersaturation control (SSC) approach for the crystallization of heat‐sensitive materials. Traditional SSC implements parabolic temperature profile with slow initial cooling that maximizes growth over nucleation, however, which may also promote heat degradation. The proposed semibatch SSC fixes the crystallization temperature to a sufficiently low value to minimize thermal degradation, and manipulates the flow rate of a higher temperature feed stream to control the supersaturation. The high temperature feed is produced in a continuous dissolver before feeding, thus the solution spends considerably shorter time at high temperature than in the traditional batch cooling crystallization. This work demonstrates the effectiveness of the semibatch operation for the cooling crystallization of heat‐sensitive substances by thorough simulation study as well as experimental investigations. The experimental validation confirmed the simulation results, and both analyses revealed the superiority of semibatch SSC for the crystallization of heat‐sensitive materials.