Ievgen Golovin

Agglomeration represents an important particle formation process used in many industries. One particularly attractive process setup is continuous fluidized bed spray agglomeration, which features good mixing as well as high heat and mass transfer on the one hand and constant product throughput with constant quality as well as high flow rates compared to batch mode on the other hand. Particle properties such as agglomerate size or porosity significantly affect overall product properties such as re-hydration behavior and dissolubility. These can be influenced by different operating parameters. In this manuscript, a population balance model for a continuous fluidized bed spray agglomeration is presented and adapted to experimental data. Focus is on the description of the dynamic behavior in continuous operation mode in a certain neighborhood around steady-state. Different kernel candidates are evaluated and it is shown that none of the kernels are able to match the first six minutes with time independent parameters. Afterwards, a good fit can be obtained, where the Brownian and the volume independent kernel models match best with the experimental data. Model fit is improved for identification on a shifted time domain neglecting the initial start-up phase. Here, model identifiability is shown and parameter confidence intervals are computed via parametric bootstrap.

Agglomeration is a particle formulation process in which at least two primary particles are combined to form a new one. The growth of agglomerates depends on interactions of particles covered with wet spots that generated by depositions of binder droplets. This work experimentally compares the influence of external feed rate and sprayed binder content on product properties and process stability with internal separation at different drying conditions. Due to the identification of parameters a populations balance model (PBM) is developed. The PBM includes the agglomeration kernel function, which characterizes the kinetics, i.e. the rate at which primary particles build agglomerates. Keywords: spray fluidized bed agglomeration; drying; continuous process; internal separation; population balances

In this article control-based reduction of gantry crane elastic swinging in the trolley travel direction is concerned. As acceleration forces of the trolley are often the reason of these vibrations, they can be utilized in an appropriate damping strategy. For an elastic crane a dynamic model is derived applying the finite element method (FEM). This approach results in a high order state-space model, which should be reduced for the controller design procedure. In order to design a controller, which can be applied for simultaneous damping of elastic vibrations of crane construction and payload sway with varying rope length a robust control approach has been applied.