(78d) Design of Powder Processing Equipment By DEM Simulation

DEM simulation in powder technology has remarkably developed recently and is applied in various unit operations such as grinding, agglomeration, mixing and classification. First of all, we have focused on grinding of solid particles. Grinding is one of the most important unit operations in powder processing , and it has been carried out in many fields of science and industries. Fine grinding operations can be done by using several types of media mills such as tumbling, vibration, planetary and stirred mill. We have numerically simulated the ball motion in media milling by Distinct Element Method (DEM) and also developed a method to predict the particle size during the batch grinding process. Recently we developed a new direct simulation method of breakage phenomena of a solid particle. The new simulation method has been named Advanced Distinct Element Method (ADEM), and ADEM is able to simulate behaviors of the non-spherical particles. ADEM has been applied to sieving and powder mixing as well, and modelling of the processes and design of the systems have been performed by computer simulation.