| Granular materials can be found at any stage of processing in many industries, such as food, pharmaceuticals, catalysts, and chemicals. These materials exhibit a variety of flow patterns, and their state and behavior differ from application to application. Since there is a lack of fundamental understanding of particulate or powder behavior, multiple problems can be encountered during routine manufacturing. Scale-up can also be a challenge, as the lack of constitutive equations for granular materials forces most scaleup efforts to follow the trial-and-error route.;Powder characterization measurements are employed as both a selection tool and a predictive method for the material's process performance. Therefore, it plays a very important role in process and product development. The numerous existing methods used to characterize the flow properties of powders are mostly application-specific and it is not clear how they correlate with each other or with process performance. Moreover, understanding the relationships between the material properties and the processing conditions is necessary for a successful design of a continuous manufacturing system, which has been a major focus for pharmaceutical industry in the recent years. Before such changes can be implemented, a better understanding of fundamental physical phenomena governing powder flow behavior must be developed.;In this work we study particulate/powder flow behavior experimentally using several characterization methods, including the Gravitational Displacement Rheometer (an avalanching tester), the rotational shear cell, and the compressibility tester. We establish the variables of interest through correlative comparison and study the differences and similarities between the methods in order to investigate particulate/powder flow behavior during processing and characterization. A mixing rule for principal stresses is developed through investigation of shear behavior of binary mixtures in a shear cell. In order to better understand the mixing rule the relationship between the particle-particle contact density and measured stresses in a powder bed is explored with DEM simulations. Powder testing methodologies were applied to a case study where the efficiency of the catalyst dry impregnation process was analyzed. As a result, predictive rules and characterization guidelines were developed for different powder systems subjected to various processing conditions. |
