For a number of reasons, solids entering and leaving manufacturing facilities are becoming increasingly finer. Such materials pose problems throughout processing. Solids featuring small particles sizes tend to dusting, result in looses and segregation, exhibit various storage, transportation, and metering problems, and find particulate effluents can not be easily captured and recycled. Sustainable industrial processing must minimize the exploitation of natural resources and avoid the need for disposal of wastes. The first requires the use of lower quality raw materials and upgrading, which typically results in the production of fine grained concentrates, and the latter encourages the recycling of wastes and byproducts or efforts to investigate them as sources for secondary raw materials or other beneficial applications. To overcome the difficulties associated with fine particulate solids, size enlargement by agglomeration is necessary. The resulting products have free flow characteristics, do no longer dust or segregate, and are sized and shaped as required for optimum processing. In addition agglomerated materials may be engineered to feature desirable structure, composition, and a number of related, improved properties. Such engineering may be applied for primary and secondary raw materials as well as for intermediate products.By the interdisciplinary application of size enlargement by agglomeration waste-free processing of solids is feasible. This will be demonstrated with the help of several case studies.
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