The application of a task-based concept for design of innovative industrial crystallizers

A new task based approach is applied to design a solution crystallization process unit. Task-based design involves the conceptual built-up of a process (unit) from functional building blocks called tasks, which represent fundamental physical events. The motivation is to get a better control over the physical events governing crystalline product quality. To deliver a proof of concept, two lines of research are followed. First of all, several small scale experiments are designed to demonstrate practical feasibility of the approach. The new lab-scale equipment allows for isolation and manipulation of individual crystallization tasks. Secondly, a model based on the experimentally tested tasks is developed for a crystallizer design and used for dynamic optimization in batch mode of product quality with minimum energy consumption. The results show that a task based crystallizer is capable of keeping the state variables very closely to ideal values, which is the direct result of the ability to control the rates at which individual crystallization tasks are executed as well as the material flows between those tasks.