Residence time distribution studies in continuous thermal processing of liquid foods: a review

Statistical data treatment for residence time distribution studies in pharmaceutical manufacturing

Residence time distribution (RTD) method has been widely used in the pharmaceutical manufacturing for understanding powder dynamics within unit operations and continuous integrated manufacturing lines. The dynamics thus captured is then used to develop predictive models for unit operations and important RTD-based applications ensuring product quality assurance. Despite thorough efforts in tracer selection, data acquisition, and calibration model development to obtain tracer concentration profiles for RTD studies, there can exist significant noise in these profiles. This noise can make it challenging to identify the underlying signal and get a representative RTD of the system under study. Such concerns have previously indicated the importance of noise handling for RTD measurements in literature. However, the literature does not provide sufficient information on noise handling or data treatment strategies for RTD studies. To this end, we investigate the impact of varying levels of noise using different tracers on measurement of RTD profile and its applications. We quantify the impact of different denoising methods (time and frequency averaging methods). Through this investigation, we see that Savitsky Golay filtering turns out to a good method for denoising RTD profiles despite varying noise levels. The investigation is performed such that the key features of the RTD profile (which are important for RTD based applications) are preserved. Subsequently, we also investigate the impact of denoising on RTD-based applications such as out-of-specification (OOS) analysis and RTD modeling. The results show that the degree of noise levels considered in this work do not significantly impact the RTD-based applications.

RTD Measurement, Modeling, and Analysis of Liquid Phase of Three-Tube Industrial Pulp Digester

Residence-time distribution (RTD) experiments were performed to analyze an industrial scale three-tube series continuous pulping digester’s hydrodynamic performance. An impulse of radiotracer 82Br (γ energy source) was introduced at the inlet of the first tube. The radiotracer concentration in the liquid phase was traced at the outlet of each tube. The input behavior of the radiotracer converted to a non-ideal pulse tracer input for the second and third tubes of the digester. Numerical convolution is adopted to deal with the non-ideal pulse input of the radiotracer. A modeling procedure for determining the RTD from the outlet tracer concentration data is proposed. A plug flow component followed by axial dispersion model is considered, and is adjusted after its convolution with the inlet tracer concentration data to obtain the RTD of the individual tubes. The obtained RTD data are analyzed to explain the flow behavior, degree of dispersion, and flow abnormalities existing in the digester. The mean residence-time (MRT), and dispersion number are estimated for the model components for the three tubes. The vessel dispersion number is found to decrease from tube 1 to tube 3. Overall, the conversion of the highly dispersed flow regime into the plug-flow regime is observed in the whole digester.