Industry Keynote

An Industrial Perspective on Problems facing the Particle Technology Community

Dr. Karl V. Jacob, Research Scientist and Technical Leader, The Dow Chemical Company

While many may feel that “all the good problems are solved” in the field of particle technology, it is the author’s opinion that many difficult problems remain to challenge us in the solids processing community.   These problems are both industrially and academically important.  We will initially take a retrospective look at all the great accomplishments over the last few years by looking at the examples of fine particle milling, computations in particle technology and cross flow filtration.   Yet the solutions of yesterday have forced our hand to work on new hard problems.   For example, while ultrafine media milling has demonstrated milling by mechanical means to 50 nanometers, problems remain in suspension stability and classification of the milled slurry.   Another difficult problem faced across all process industries is that of caking or time consolidation of bulk solids.  While seemingly mundane, caking can bring a process to its knees or render a final product unusable.   We will examine the state of the art in time consolidation of powders and highlight the considerable challenges that remain.