(171b) Particle Technology in Europe

Particle technology is a complicated, diverse and fractured discipline, and this is as true in Europe (which, through Rumpf, can claim to have organised the subject into its modern form) as it is in other parts of the World. At one end of the discipline are those physicists whose primary aim is to explain the fundamental behaviour of granular systems in a generic way ? a ?new state?. At the other are practioners who are in the business of designing processes and making products. In that respect, not much has changed over the period of the last few World Congresses. In the UK, the national engineering and physical science research council has two advisory panels, whose brief is to comment on technical opportunities and on uses of technology. This talk will follow that model.

As far as technical opportunities are concerned, new science, particularly new bioscience, presents new challenges in application. Has particle technology anything to offer in understanding how cells interact? We had better hope so. Advances have occurred at some pace in instrumentation ? tomography in all its variants, atomic force microscopy and environmental scanning electron microscopy are examples. It is fair to say that we now know a lot more about what is happening at the single particle level than we did 10 years ago. In computation, there has been a very rapid increase in the number of users of discrete element method (DEM) codes, with advances being made in many new areas. The codes have advanced too, but there is real argument about the depth in which the particle interactions should and need to be modelled. Computational fluid mechanics (CFD) codes have advanced too, and moved strongly into particle technology, despite concerns about their how well they can handle granular systems. There is general agreement that modellers and experimentalists need to get together to validate modelling approaches. Looked at the other way around, the results of the models can of course tell the experimentalists what to look for.

From the user side, Europe has seen an extremely rapid and accelerating move out of commodities and into specialities, including pharmaceuticals and food. There is tremendous interest in formulating products for increased and novel efficacy, and this is driving new developments in particle technology research throughout Europe. Not least of the challenges here is that research is linked closely to market needs, so projects are rarely long-term. Many ? perhaps most ? of these businesses do not know that they are doing particle technology ? there is a challenge here to convince them that we have something useful to offer.

In Europe, as elsewhere, there is much to play for, but we have to adapt to a very different set of opportunities and drivers than those which underpinned the original development of the subject 50 years ago.