Editor’s Preface

Editor’s Preface

Gabrie M.H. Meesters

Chairman of European/African Editorial Board

Delft University of Technology, The Netherlands

Dear KONA readers:

Before you lies the newest issue of the KONA journal. We can all be proud of the articles that are published in the printed version but even more papers can be found in the on-line version of KONA. What makes KONA special is the selection of the papers that we publish. For me as chairman of the European-African editorial group, we make a big effort to select and invite people to submit papers to the KONA editorial board. This sounds simple, but since we want high quality we need to select carefully, which does not make this task easy. Since the field of particle technology and solids handling is so wide and getting wider still, we try to select from this broad field, the best but also interesting papers possible.

The fact that we nowadays deal with particles in the nano range to over the centimeter range even makes the field broader, but even more challenging is that the areas where these different particles are applied spread over an even broader field. From medical to mining, from production of particles to environmental issues related to particle emissions, from nano particle production to large particle processing, from functionality development to bulk processing and from modelling to device and technologies development and applications. I studied particle technology in the late 1980s under the guidance of Prof. Brian Scarlett and at that time particle technology was an area mainly dominated by bulk processing, mainly researched from chemical or mechanical engineering groups. Today the broadness of the particle research has spread through almost all the disciplines. This makes it difficult to oversee the whole field of particle technology, but it gets the particle or solids technology into the place where we want them, next to gaseous and liquid systems. We are not there yet. We still need more knowledge and understanding. We need better models and sensors for proper particle process development. Models are getting much better due to the better computer systems, but also to the better understanding of particle behaviours and properties. Now sensor development needs to evolve to be better capable of controlling particulate systems, thus enabling better processing leading to higher quality of products and better economics of our processes. The next decades will be exciting.

KONA will continue to follow these developments. You will experience the broadness of particulate applications and technologies that are developed in different fields when reading the articles in the KONA Journal. We should benefit from the knowledge developed in a certain field to extend this to other fields. Applications or techniques used in the medical field, for example, can also be used in catalysis engineering, as long as we are capable and willing to interest ourselves in these different fields. Again that is why it is so exciting to read journals like KONA to find the similarities between our fields and explore the new ideas in another field.

Enjoy reading this edition of KONA and try to expand your knowledge by reading especially the articles from a completely other field of particle technology.

Gabrie M.H. Meesters

Chairman of European/African Editorial Board

Ass. Prof., Delft University of Technology

October 2018