Plenary Talk: Raiding the toolbox to tackle practical issues in particle technology

Cohesive particles are an integral and unavoidable presence in numerous practical applications – pharmaceutical powders, specialty chemicals, catalysts for energy production, to name just a few. The prediction of cohesive-particle flows is tricky at best, culminating in dozens of empirical correlations that can vary by orders of magnitude when applied to the same system. More recently, physically-based modeling endeavors for such flows have ensued, though their application to practical, industrial systems remains in its infancy for a number of reasons: cohesive forces like van der Waals forces are ridiculously sensitive to surface roughness, measuring surface roughness involves sophisticated equipment and highly-trained personnel, predicting cohesive forces for a given surface roughness is complex, converting particle-level cohesion into the necessary macro-scale (continuum) quantities is non-trivial, etc.

We recently undertook a 5+ year journey with our industrial sponsor to develop a physically-based and industrially-feasible framework to predict cohesive-particle flows. To overcome some of the stickiest obstacles along the way, we raided the toolbox of experimental and computational methods. Our trials and tribulations and (thankfully) successes will be overviewed.