Effective Kawakita parameters for binary mixtures

Despite the fact that many industrial processes use mixtures of powders with different physical and mechanical properties, most fundamental studies of powder compression have focused on single-component systems. There is thus an obvious need for an improved understanding of the compression behaviour of mixtures of particulate and granular solids. In this contribution, we show that the Kawakita equation may be particularly useful in this regard. The reason for this is that the degree of compression (i.e., the ratio between the volume reduction and the initial powder volume) for sufficiently high compression pressures P is a linear function of 1 / P. For ideal mixtures, for which the volume of each component may be determined independently of the others, this linearity implies that effective Kawakita parameters for the mixture may be readily expressed in terms of the parameters of its components. In order to validate the proposed approach, binary mixtures of mm-sized spherical agglomerates prepared by wet granulation followed by extrusion and spheronization were investigated experimentally. Predicted and measured Kawakita parameters were generally in good agreement, indicating that the assumption of ideal mixing behaviour is valid for this type of systems.