Spray drying is used for the manufacture of many consumer and industrial products such as instant dairy and food products, laundry detergents, pharmaceuticals, ceramics, and agrochemicals. During spray drying, agglomerates of powder particles are formed which determine the instant properties of the powder. Agglomeration during spray drying is considered to be a difficult process to control. The main cause of this is the complex interaction of the process variables: the atomization process, the mixing of spray and hot air, the drying of suspension droplets and the collision of particles which might lead to coalescence or agglomeration. As a consequence, agglomeration during spray drying is operated by trial-anderror. In an EC-sponsored project, named the EDECAD projects, an industrially validated computer model, using CFD technology, to predict agglomeration processes in spray drying machines is developed. An Euler-Lagrange approach with appropriate elementary models for drying, collision, coalescence and agglomeration of the dispersed phase is used. The main result of the EDECAD project is a so-called ''Design Tool,'' which establishes relations between the configuration of the drying installation (geometry, nozzle selection), process conditions, product composition and final powder properties. The Design Tool is being validated on pilot-plant scale and industrial scale. It will provide an advanced tool for improved design and optimization of spray drying and agglomeration equipment, to improve the quality of products and to increase the productivity of such equipment. This article introduces the background and approach of the project and some preliminary results.
The quality of interferometric measurement methods, such as fault detection by shearography, is highly influenced by the intensity distribution of the illuminating light. Usually it is intended to obtain a homogeneous object illumination while common laser light sources provide a gaussian intensity distribution. In this paper it is investigated how the intensity distribution of the detected light is influenced by the polarization states of the incident and the scattered light. In literature usually the Stratton-Chu equation is used to describe depolarization effects. However, this equation is valid only in the Fraunhofer region, which is unsuitable for most interferometric measurements. For this reason a still unpublished general expression for the amplitude of the electromagnetic field close to the scattering surface is derived. Based on this novel formula the correlation between the intensity distribution and the polarization state of the scattered light is investigated analytically, numerically and experimentally. In the numerical part the integral formula is used to generate the light field scattered by a metal plate. As input data for the simulation the measured surface structure of a real metal plate is used. Additionally, the theoretical results are compared to measured intensity distributions for several combinations of input and output polarization states.
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