Guest Speaker: Ben Freirich, Technical Director, Particulate Solid Research, Inc. (PSRI)
Ben Freireich is the Technical Director at Particulate Solid Research, Inc. (PSRI) and previously a Research Scientist in Engineering Sciences at The Dow Chemical Company in the Solids Processing Lab. He obtained his PhD in Mechanical Engineering from Purdue University studying manufacturing processes involving solid materials (particles, powders, etc). At PSRI, Ben guides member and contract research efforts executed by the technical staff. PSRI is a consortium-based research company with member companies across the globe that applies and generates fundamental research in the area particle technology with focus on fluidized systems. At Dow he was involved in many products and processes, with expertise on powder flowability, fluidization, size enlargement, attrition, and other areas of solids processing. Ben has over 20 publications and over 350 citations, sits on the Executive Committee of the AIChE Particle Technology Forum, is the Chair of ASTM D18.24 sub-committee on Characterization of Bulk Solids and Powders, and was recently named one of AIChE’s 35 under 35 for 2017. He lives in Chicago, IL and has four children.
"Particle Technology? What’s that?"
Nearly every material you interact with was or interacted with a particle at some point during it’s journey toward being a final product. Raw materials, intermediates, catalysts, sorbents, final products, etc. Particles were somewhere. And if they weren’t part of that chain, the showed up as waste or fouling. Yet even with these billions of pounds of solids being processed and handled every year, most chemical engineers are ill-equipped to deal with the complexities of the engineering science of solids processing. Hence, plants and products suffer with lost production, inability to achieve design production rates, off grade, or off specification products. During this talk we will take a look at the fun world of solids processing and you will learn the few key concepts of particle technology.
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