This concluding report for the grant described the development of software and instrumentation to obtain information for understanding product formulation, notably for pastes, aerated pastes, foams and flowing suspensions.
Of particular note and novelty are the development of:
• An electrically-based system for in-situ monitoring of paste extrusion from which information on homogeneity of the product can be inferred in the barrel and die;
• software for interpreting conductivity data for high gas content foams to deduce the cellular density and, from temporal information, likely cell size;
• methods for using x-ray tomography to measure paste homogeneity (on ex-situ samples) to complement the above methods;
• methods for characterising sediments through 3d structure mapping that can then be used as inputs to lattice Boltzmann simulations to predict fluid permeability directly;
• very high speed electrical impedance tomographic (EIT) imaging methods that can be used to visualise flowing particulate suspensions up to 20 m/s and from which voxel-voxel correlation methods can yield angular, axial and tangential velocities directly;
• use of the EIT methods for quantitative measurement of fluid dynamics for comparison with or integration into process based models for fluid flow or computational fluids dynamic predictions.
Examples of these developments and background work are described and cited in this report together with support appendices.
R A Williams