POPULATION BALANCE MODEL

Population Balance
A population balance on any system is concerned with keeping track of numbers of entities, may be solid, particles, drops, bubbles, cells, or more abstractly, events whose presence or occurrence may dictate the behavior of the system under study.
Doraiswami Ramkrishna, Alan W. Mahoney

 If particles in air or water are unstable, COLLISIONS can result in AGGLOMERATION or FLOCCULATION Examples:
Coagulation of aerosols Growth of rain droplets in clouds Precipitation kinetics (inorganics) Flocculation

Flocculation types

Population Balance Model

Defined by the collective phenomenology contained in the displacement of entities through their state space and the birth-anddeath processes.

If there are nA As, the overall rate of Collisions between A and B is

The rate that B collide with A is given by

Population Balance Model

General Dynamic Equation

Population Balance Equation

Particle growth and Dissolution

Breakage

Aggregation

Nucleation
Depending on the application, spontaneous nucleation of particles can occur due to the transfer of molecules from the primary phase. For example, in crystallization from solution, the first step is the phase separation or \birth" of new crystals. In boiling applications, the creation of the first vapor bubbles is a nucleation process referred to as nucleate boiling.

Solutions
Discrete Method
(also known as the classes or sectional method) was developed by Hounslow, Litster, and Ramkrishna . It is based on representing the continuous particle size distribution (PSD) in terms of a set of discrete size classes or bins; the advantages of this method are its robust numerics and that it gives the PSD directly. The disadvantages are that the bins must be defined a priori and that a large number of classes may be required.

Numerical Method
software FLUENT

Numerical Method
software FLUENT

Numerical Method
software FLUENT

Solutions
2. Standard Method of Moments (SMM)
- proposed by Randolph and Larson; an alternative to PBE; reduces dimensionality of the problem and it is relatively simple to solve transport equations for lower-order moments however exact closure of the right-hand side is possible only in cases of constant aggregation and size-independent growth, while breakage modeling is not possible.

2. Quadrature Method of Moments (QMOM

- first proposed by McGraw for modeling aerosol evolution and coagulation problems; requires relatively small number of scalar equations to track the moments of population with small errors; an alternative to the discrete method when only aggregation quantities are desired; uses fewer variables

References
Ducotse, J., An introduction to Population balance modeling, MBR Training Seminar, Ghant University, 2007. www.tchpc.tcd.ie/fluent/Unpacked_ISOs/Flue nt__6.3.../chp02