Process control
Processes involving particulate materials are of great importance in different engineering applications and industries, including chemical engineering, food industry, systems biology, pharmaceutical engineering, milling, geology, etc. Most of such applications involve simultaneously various particulate phenomena such as nucleation, growth, aggregation/agglomeration and breakage/attrition etc. We work on modeling and control of particulate systems, mainly in chemical engineering applications like crystallization and granulation. We develop a new modelling formalism called Approximate Method of Moments (AMOM) for a wide class of population balance models (PBM). Our proposed scheme devises (approximate) models for PBMs in finite-order ODE settings which are useful for optimal control problems in particulate systems, for instance, control of particle size distribution.
Batch Crystallization
Population balance systems in batch crystallization are typically described by integro-differential equations, where integral terms describe the macroscopic kinetics and partial differential equations (typically, of hyperbolic type) describe the evolution of various local phenomena in dispersed phase, including advection, nucleation, fines dissolution, agglomeration and breakage.
Continuous Granulation
Granulation is the process of forming granules from a powdery material by addition of liquid binder. It is applied in several technological processes in the chemical and pharmaceutical industries, for instance, in tablet formation. Twin screw granulation is one of the various techniques being utilized in continuous granulation. The dominating mechanisms in granulation are nucleation, growth, agglomeration and breakage.
Autonomous Powder Compaction
Powder compaction performed on a rotary tablet press is a dry granulation method to transfer powder materials consisting of several components (drug, lubricant and other excipients) into compacts (tablets). This process is usually integrated in a multi-stage manufacturing line for the product design. The product quality indices refer to the dose, hardness, disintegration and dissolution of the compacts.
CO2 Carbonation by Use of Mine Waste
Avoiding catastrophic climate change requires dramatically decreasing greenhouse gas emissions and removing already-emitted CO2 from the atmosphere paired with permanent CO2 storage. Through carbon mineralization, CO2 can be stored as carbonates which are environmentally benign and stable, and thus make mineral carbonation a permanent and leakage free CO2 disposal method.