The handling of granular material concerns dozens of billion tons of material worldwide. Approximately 50% of all goods once existed as granular form during their industrial production. The quality of the end product is strongly affected by the overall handling of the particles during the production processes.

The Institute of Particle Process Engineering started research in bulk solids handling in 1972, which is currently carried on by the EU Interreg project “PowderReg”. The project aims to optimize industrial processes with granular materials – from storage to the end product. This includes experimental and simulation-aided investigations of powder flow properties under high stresses (shear cells) and for free flowing regimes (powder rheometer) to predict flow profiles and mass flow rates during silo discharge.
The project “Analysis of the fluidization and shear conditions in rotor fluidized beds under dry and wet conditions" investigates the influence of liquids and particle shape on particle dynamics in a dense sheared gas-solid flow. Granulation and coating are modeled with a CFD-DEM approach. Using the example of a rotor fluidized bed, detailed experimental investigations of the particle dynamics are carried out using a novel MPT measuring technique under dry and wet conditions (spraying liquids).