DEM-PBM modelling of abrasion dominated ribbon breakage

In dry granulation, fine cohesive powders are compacted into large multi-particle entities, i.e., briquettes, flakes or ribbons. The powder compaction is generally followed by milling, a size reduction process, which is crucial to obtain the desired granule size or properties. Abrasion and impact are two primary mechanisms of comminution in ribbon milling, but they are not completely understood. The aim of this paper was hence to investigate numerically the fragmentation process induced by abrasion during ribbon milling. The discrete element method (DEM) was employed to simulate abrasion tests, for which three-dimensional parallelepiped ribbons were generated using auto-adhesive elastic spheres. The fragmentation rate, and the fragments size and number were determined for various surface energies and abrasive velocities. The DEM results showed that the mass-equivalent fragment size distributions were bi-modal, similar to the experimental observations and the numerical results for impact-dominated ribbon milling reported in the literature. In addition, two quantities were determined from the DEM analysis, i.e. the number of large fragments and the fraction of fines, which was then integrated into the population balance models (PBM) so that a DEM-PBM multiscale modelling framework was developed to predict the granule size distribution during ribbon milling. The DEM-PBM results were compared with the experimental results reported in the literature, and a broad agreement was obtained, implying the proposed DEM-PBM can be used to analyse the ribbon milling behaviour