Population Balance Modeling Used as a Tool for Process Scale Up

Engineers are born with mass and energy balances as a goto tool, useful for everything from process design and scale up to troubleshooting their dishwasher at home. Some more math hungry engineers may even venture into the space of momentum balances for fluid mechanical calculations. However, few are exposed to population balances. The math can be somewhat intimidating, making conceptual understanding inaccessible. Nevertheless, the tool is useful for grasping complex ideas about distributed quantities (e.g. particle size distributions, age distributions, composition distributions) with almost the same ease as mass and energy balances. In this talk I intend to help overcome the conceptual and mathematical challenges of population balances so that process development engineers may add them to their tool box.