(196a) Particle Technology Education 2006

The title ?Particle Technology Education 2006? suggests that we might be looking at new topics in particle technology, such as nanotechnology and biotechnology. Whilst I recognize the importance of working out how best to distil the vast developing knowledge in these areas into forms suitable for university and post-experience education, I prefer to concentrate on the problems associated with industry's assimilation of long-established particle technology knowledge and understanding.

Formal education in particle technology has been around now for perhaps 40 years or more and has been increasingly widespread over the past two decades, so we might expect that most of the simple fundamental concepts are now common knowledge in industry. Some case studies gathered from industry are presented which show that this is far from the truth. The examples cover a range of process industries and deal with issues such as scale-up in pneumatic transport, sampling, size analysis, design and interfacing of hopper and behaviour of aerated powders. The conclusion is that there is still widespread ignorance of the simple facts of particle technology and powder behaviour. Glaring and expensive mistakes are made because of a lack of respect for the differences in behaviour between powders and fluids. Industry is still making inappropriate decisions based on analysis of unrepresentative samples, still designing and scaling up plant on the basis of superficial and erroneous concepts, still building 300 tonne storage bins with a 50 tonne active capacity and is still not able to get powder to flow reliably out of hoppers.

It is hoped that the presentation will raise discussion on how to best tackle the problem of educating engineers and scientists in industry in the ways of the powder and the particle.