INSTABILITY AND UNSTEADY PROCESSES OF THE BULK CONTINUOUS CRYSTALLIZATION .1. LINEAR-STABILITY ANALYSIS

The physical nature of the instability of stationary regimes of continuous crystallization from supersaturated solutions is explained. The system of equations with distributed parameters, comprising the mass and number balance laws expressed in terms of the crystal size distribution function, is reduced to a single functional integro-differential equation describing the evolution of the saturation for arbitrary mass flux of a supersaturated solution into a volume under consideration, nucleation and crystal growth kinetics and withdrawal rate of crystals out of the volume. The mechanism of instability of a stationary crystallization process is studied. Dependencies of the neutral stability surface and of the period of initial self-oscillations occurring as a result of the instability upon physico-chemical and operating parameters are obtained. A comparison of theory and experiments is presented.