Scribd
Upload
18 views2 pages

Size Reduction

Size reduction is the process of breaking down solid particles into smaller ones through applying energy in the form of stress. It is commonly used in food industries for various purposes like desired material sizes, increased surface area, and accessibility to interior materials. Various methods are used including compression, impact, shear, and cutting. Comminution laws help determine energy consumption during size reduction, but do not account for all mechanical losses. Kick's law states work required is constant for a given reduction ratio regardless of original size, but it does not accurately capture energy needs for reducing fine particles.

Uploaded by

vijay kumar honnali
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
Available Formats
Download as DOCX, PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
18 views2 pages

Size Reduction

Size reduction is the process of breaking down solid particles into smaller ones through applying energy in the form of stress. It is commonly used in food industries for various purposes like desired material sizes, increased surface area, and accessibility to interior materials. Various methods are used including compression, impact, shear, and cutting. Comminution laws help determine energy consumption during size reduction, but do not account for all mechanical losses. Kick's law states work required is constant for a given reduction ratio regardless of original size, but it does not accurately capture energy needs for reducing fine particles.

Uploaded by

vijay kumar honnali
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
Available Formats
Download as DOCX, PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
You are on page 1/ 2

Size reduction is the process of breaking down solid particle to smaller one.

When
energy is applied in the form of a stress on a material, it breaks into two or more pieces
resulting in generation of new surface area. Energy is used to break or overcome the
intramolecular forces of the solid particles so that they are broken into pieces and new
area is created. Size reduction is also known as comminution in engineering literature.
Size reduction is commonly used in food industries with many purposes. some of the
purposes are given below.

Advantage of size reduction:


1. Materials of desired size are desired for certain processing as in canning of fruits and
vegetables or making of fruit bars.
2. Increased surface area will help in enhanced heat and mass transfer and hence race
process are enhanced.
3. The reduced particle size would enable accessibility to the interior of food materials
as in leaching of spice oleoresins or oil from oilseeds.
4. In preparation of certain baby foods, soup mixes, gruel. Reduced particle size is
necessity and not an option.
Various types of methods used in size reduction.
1. Compression: Example; Nut cracker, Crushing Rolls
2. Impact: Example; Hammer, Hammer mill
3. Shear: Example; Grinding and Milling
4. Cutting: Example; Cutting with knife / saw

Laws of comminution: It is almost impossible to find out the accurate amount of


energy requirement in order to affect size reduction of a given material, mainly because
1. There is wide variation in the size and shape of particles both in feed and product
2. Some energy is wasted as heat and sound which cannot be determined exactly.
Laws of comminution proposed by different authors help us to determine the energy
consumed in comminution that is the creation of new surface. Many of them do not take
care of mechanical losses in the crusher. Most popular comminution laws are those
proposed by Kick, Rittinger and Bond.

Kick’s Law (1885):


Kick’s law that can be applied to crushing states that “the work required for crushing a
given quantity of material is constant for a given reduction ratio irrespective of its
original size”. Mathematically this law can be expressed as
Thus, comminution energy depends only on the reduction ratio and is independent of
original size of feed.
Limitation of Kick’s law: The energy required for reducing a 200 mm particle to 50 mm
size will be the same as that for a 2 mm particle to 0.5 mm. In fact, higher amount of
energy is required for reducing fine particles to still finer size than for breaking down of
large pieces of rock. This is because, when we consider smaller particle, more collisions
are required and collisions that do not participate in size reduction is wasted. Thus kicks
law can be applied to coarse crushing where feed size is quite large and reduction ratio
is quite low.

You might also like