Solution of population balances with growth and nucleation by high order moment-conserving method of classes

The high order method of classes, developed in our earlier work [Alopaeus, V., Laakkonen, M., Aittamaa J., 2006a. Solution of population balances with breakage and agglomeration by high order moment-conserving method of classes. Chemical Engineering Science 61, 6732–6752] for solution of population balances (PBs), is extended to problems with growth and primary nucleation. The growth problem leads to a hyperbolic partial differential equation with fundamentally different numerical characteristics than the PB with breakage and agglomeration only. However, we show that the principle of moment conservation in the numerical solution can also be applied to this advection-type problem, leading to extremely accurate numerical solutions. The method is tested for two numerical cases. The first one is mass transfer induced particle growth, and the second one is primary nucleation with constant growth (similar to the Riemann advection problem). For mass transfer induced growth, we first analyze functional form of the growth rate from mass transfer correlation viewpoint, and derive a general analytical solution for the power-law growth. The numerical results from the moment conserving method are also compared to one well established high resolution numerical method for advection problems, namely the Lax–Wendroff method with van Leer flux limiter. It was shown that the present method is far superior by predicting the distribution moments with several order of magnitudes lower numerical error. For the Riemann problem with constant growth rate, the present method predicts the shock front location exactly without any numerical diffusion.