ISSN:
0934-0866
Keywords:
Chemistry
;
Industrial Chemistry and Chemical Engineering
Source:
Wiley InterScience Backfile Collection 1832-2000
Topics:
Mechanical Engineering, Materials Science, Production Engineering, Mining and Metallurgy, Traffic Engineering, Precision Mechanics
,
Process Engineering, Biotechnology, Nutrition Technology
Notes:
It is often necessary to estimate the properties of particle size distributions from limited samples taken from large populations. When the distributions are broad, and higher order moments required, as in the case of volume based particle size distributions, the inferred parameters d3,50 (volume median diameter) and GSD (geometric standard deviation) can have high intrinsic errors not immediately obvious to the measuring scientist. We show that there is a critical number of particles, Ncrit, which must be counted or else the error may blow up catastrophically. Ncrit is very sensitive to the width of the distribution, and is approximately proportional to GSD11 We develop formulae to estimate the random sampling error inherent in measured values of the d3,50 and GSD for the log-normal distribution; compare the predictions to a typical experimental particle size measurement; and then generalize to the median of any arbitrary moment, dr, 50.
Additional Material:
9 Ill.
Type of Medium:
Electronic Resource
URL:
http://dx.doi.org/10.1002/ppsc.19930100106
