Cohesion and agglomeration of wet powders

Wet high-shear granulation consists in vigorously mixing grains and a liquid binder to create agglomerates of various sizes. The process results from a balance between cohesion of the wet granular agglomerates and fragmentation due to the high mixing. By performing a simple test with glass beads and various liquids, we first focus on the static cohesion of wet granular media. Contrary to previous works, we extend the study to larger values of the liquid fraction w. After the well-documented plateau, the cohesive strength increases again with w, a behavior we capture by a simple model. We then focus on the dynamical cohesion of the media and we design an agglomeration process that consists in vibrating a bead/liquid mixture at a large amplitude. The vibrations induce not only the fluidization of the wet granular material but also the formation of aggregates. As expected, their size is affected by the liquid content, the frequency, and the amplitude of the vibrations, similarly to high-shear granulation data. However, the number of beads in an agglomerate does not depend on the bead size, showing a self-similar mechanism of agglomeration. The role of the static cohesion strength in this dynamical process remains therefore ambiguous.