Growth kinetics: a thermodynamic approach

The analysis and development of industrial crystallization processes requires knowledge of the kinetics of the crystal growth process. This has led to a large number of studies of crystallization kinetics in a variety of systems. A review of these studies reveals the general use of an empirical power-law model for crystal growth kinetics, along with a variety of different definitions of supersaturation. In this work, supersaturation, the driving force for crystallization has been examined from a thermodynamic perspective and combined with the Burton-Cabrera-Frank crystal growth model to obtain a simplified and consistent method to analyze crystal growth data and obtain kinetics with only a single constant. This method is applied to a number of systems employing kinetic data obtained from the literature and thermodynamic data measured in this laboratory. The results demonstrate the simplicity and utility of the method. (C) 2002 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.