Micro-macro transition from discrete modeling to population balances in spray fluidized bed agglomeration

Micro-interactions play a fundamental role in molding the macroscopic behavior of processes involving a dispersed system, such as spray fluidized bed granulation. In spray fluidized bed granulation, particles get aggregated and dried simultaneously by passing through many complex micro-processes which change the physical properties of the particles such as flowability, density or porosity, shape etc. The present work addresses the study of such micro-interactions through a microscale modeling approach and translating their effects onto a macroscale level by modeling the influencing parameters. This work exploits the advantages of the Monte-Carlo method to model the aggregation kernel of one-dimensional PBE in a way that the process parameters can be correlated to the kinetics. In this frame, a sophisticated constant number Monte-Carlo algorithm code to simulate the spray fluidized bed granulation process is written which is then used to analyze the effect of each micro-process on the net (macro) behavior of the granulation process.