Precipitation-Promoted Growth

Long-term chemical changes also take place in the maturation vessel such as esterification and certain reductions. During the post-fermenting treatment of beer it is necessary to promote clarification of the beer and, by stabilizing treatment, ensure that turbidity due to chemical precipitation or growth of micro-organisms does not occur. 

Scaling is not always related to temperature. Calcium carbonate and calcium sulfate scaling occur on unheated surfaces when their solubiUties are exceeded in the bulk water. Metallic surfaces are ideal sites for crystal nucleation because of their rough surfaces and the low velocities adjacent to the surface. Corrosion cells on the metal surface produce areas of high pH, which promote the precipitation of many cooling water salts. Once formed, scale deposits initiate additional nucleation, and crystal growth proceeds at an accelerated rate. 

When the goal is the production of fine particles it is important to save the primary size of the crystals as they appear first in the solution, i.e. the nucleation has to be promoted over the growth and aggregation steps. In the case of undersaturated, weak initial solutions the precipitation takes place near the metastable region where the kinetic processes are rather slow. For example, the induction time which was necessary for crystallization in the weakest NaCl solutions approaches to 60 min. Repeating the precipitation (where the ethanol content was the same 99.6%) with saturated aqueous solution there was no measurable induction time and the particle size changed considerably within the applied 60 min operational time the d was 4.41 p,m after 10 min, 8.86 pm at 20 min and finally 16.27 pm at 60 min. It is obvious that in the latter case not the smallest available size was measured after 60 min, but for the sake of comparison the same operational time had to be applied. 

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