Villanueva-López, Vladimir

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    Experimental and numerical study of the continuous fluidized bed dryer
    (2016) Villanueva-López, Vladimir; Velázquez-Figueroa, Carlos; College of Engineering; Bogere, Moses N.; Estévez De Vidts, Antonio L.; Department of Chemical Engineering; Castillo, Paul E.
    Nowadays, batch fluid-bed drying is one of the most efficient drying methods for particulate material; but at the same time, it is the most energy consuming operation in the manufacturing of solid dosage forms. To minimize cost and speed up the production of pharmaceutical products, the continuous manufacturing emerges as an important alternative. The advantages of this technology in comparison to the batch fluid bed dryer, which is the most predominant in the industry is to reduce cycle times, optimize for faster production, guarantee real-time quality assurance. This work was oriented to understand the continuous fluidized bed drying phenomena by using numerical simulations and experimentation. I designed a prototype of a continuous fluid bed dryer by using computer aided design CAD coupled with computational fluid dynamic simulations CFD. The equipment promotes back-mixing and the transportation of the particles through the units, by the momentum exerted by the inlet airflow without requiring a mechanical assistant to exit. The effect of the inlet air velocity and inlet air temperature were evaluated at different initial moisture contents of the lactose granules. A two-phase model proposed by Burgschweiger and Tsotsas[1] included in the processing system engineering tool gSOLIDS for PSE Enterprise was used to understand the interaction of the process parameters with the performance of the novel continuous fluid bed dryer. The two mass transfer correlations were evaluated to describe the drying kinetics of the particles in the emulsion phase. It was found that the inclusion of the mass transfer correlation proposed by Rhode, result on better predictions of the moisture content of the granules at the outlet of the continuous fluid bed dryer. Finally, the coupling of computation fluid dynamics with discrete elements methods simulations was used to visualize the fluidization patterns inside the equipment. In this way was possible to visualize the residence time of the particles.