Crystallization Essay

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Crystallization is one of the oldest unit operations widely used in industries for the separation and purification of solid products. It is a popular operation in majority of industries, including pharmaceutical, food, microelectronics and bulk and fine chemicals. The production process of the majority of all solid products includes at least one crystallization step during the synthesis or purification of intermediates or the final product. Since crystallization is often the first step when the pure solid product is separated from the liquid solution it represents a crucial process to tailor the solid properties, such as crystal size distribution (CSD), shape, polymorphic form and purity. Since these physical characteristics have a strong effect on the final product properties as well as on the efficiency of the downstream processes (such as filtration, drying etc.), the proper design and control of crystallization processes can have a significant effect on the overall efficiency of the solid production process and the quality of the final product. During the past two decades significant research effort has been made to develop a better understanding of the crystallization mechanisms like nucleation, growth etc, as well as on the modeling and control of crystallization systems. The advancement in process analytical technology and computing power has made this task much easier. The key developments have occurred in novel crystallization concepts, modeling, monitoring and control. A major development in the modeling area is the use of multi-dimensional population balance models which gives the morphological model of crystallization processes, as well as in the better understanding of crystallization in impure media. Developments in... ... middle of paper ... ...re are some additional difficulties which diminish their appeal: Unlike the univarite case, the scale of the values displayed on the multivariate chart is not related to the scales of any of the monitored variables. Once an out-of-control signal is given by a multivariate chart, it may be difficult to determine which variable caused this signal. More complicated operations are required to determine the origin of the signals. Therefore, Multivariate Statistical Process Control (MSPC) techniques, which consider all the variables of interest simultaneously and can, extract information on the behavior of each variable or characteristic relative to the others is highly essential. MSPC research is having high value in theoretical as well as practical application and is certainly be beneficial to process monitoring, fault detection and process identification and control.

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