Disperse Systems are often characterised by so-called property distributions, for example particle size distributions or moisture content distributions. From an industrial point of view there is great interest in influencing these distributions directly as they determine important product characteristics.

In the research topic Feedback Control of Particle Properties control strategies for the direct shaping of particle property distributions are developed and tested. The focus lies here on nonlinear state-space based strategies, where process models derived from population balances are used for the controller design.

Another important research topic is the model-based measurement of process quantities in fluidized bed processes. In many cases not all quantities necessary for feedback control can be measured directly or the measurements are not of the needed quality (e. g. corrupted by noise, delayed by internal analysis). In these cases the interesting quantites can be reconstructed from the measured ones (or more easily measured ones) using a mathematical process model in parallel to the process. This allows a dynamic reconstruction, that is the reconstructed quantites are available during the process (with limited noise and almost no delay) and can then be used for the control of the processes. The focus lies here in the reconstruction of particle property distributions.



The research project is funded by the German Federal Ministry of Science and Education (BMBF) as part of the InnoProfile-Transfer project "Unternehmen Region".