ANALYSIS OF A CONTINUOUS CRYSTALLIZER WITH AGGLOMERATION

The analysis of a continuously stirred tank crystallizer in which the particles may undergo agglomeration is presented. It is shown that a solution presented previously is in error due to an assumption made in the development of the model, and that a solution in the form of a Taylor series expansion can be derived easily. The accuracy of this revised solution is determined by the number of terms used in the series. A rather large number of terms is required to generate accurate results in some cases. It is shown that physically meaningful solutions do not exist for some values of the agglomeration parameter. For acceptable values of the parameter it is shown that the particle-size distribution is monomodal. For unacceptable values of the parameter, the model solution is unbounded at large sizes, and does not predict a bimodal size distribution.