During the 1995 Annual Meeting of IFPRI at Urbana, IL, USA, the enclosed statement was published and presented. It describes in a short form pressure agglomeration, its subdivision into low, medium, and high pressure techniques, the mechanisms of pressure agglomeration, as well as the author’s opinion as to where need exists for development and research.
To further describe the state-of-the-art of pressure agglomeration, excerpts from the author’s book entitled “Size Enlargement by Agglomeration” are submitted herewith.
It had been suggested to summarize recent research for this report. However, after obtaining “suitable references” from within IFPRI and from searching this author’s files it became clear that such published studies are very specific. They relate mostly to requirements in the pharmaceutical industry or to other specialized applications. They often draw conclusions which are not of general interest and sometimes even misinterpret the basics of the unit operation.
It is not the intent of this report to reconcile the results of such studies. This should be done in a scientific research environment during an interdisciplinary literature search which, again in the reporter’s opinion, is the first and foremost work in this field that should be sponsored by IFPRI. The result of such a study should be general and unified conclusions and a true statement as to what basic information is available. At the same time the many publications must be disregarded which try to explain the influence of specific materials, additives, process modifications, and parameters for very limited applications without connecting this work with a theory that is generally valid.