Industrial Crystallization
About this ebook
Crystallization can be found in multiple areas within materials design and separations. The product of a crystallization step may be a single crystal or a powder. It may be composed of small organic molecules, inorganic salts, biological molecules, or single elements. Similarly, it may have been crystallized from its molten state or pre-dissolved in an appropriate solvent and then crystallized (via, e.g., cooling, antisolvent addition, a chemical reaction, or solvent evaporation). Each of these combinations may be their field of research, requiring very different approaches and considerations that warrant their primers.
This primer focuses on solvent-mediated crystallization as a separation process, often called solution crystallization, with solid−liquid suspensions being the main product.
About the author
Gerard Capellades is an Assistant Professor of Chemical Engineering at Rowan University, serving as the director for the Crystallization Science & Pharmaceutical Engineering (CSPE) group since 2020. He received his Ph.D. from the Technical University of Denmark in 2017, for his work on the design of continuous crystallizers for pharmaceutical manufacturing. Before his faculty appointment, he took three years of postdoctoral training at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), under the mentorship of Prof. Allan S. Myerson and Prof. Richard D. Braatz. Dr. Capellades’ career has been marked by strong ties with the pharmaceutical industry, aiming to bridge the gap between crystallization fundamentals and industrial practice. As a result, most of his projects and publications include one or more industrial collaborators. Dr. Capellades has been the recipient of multiple awards, including the prestigious NSF CAREER award (2024), and he was also named as one of 2023’s KEEN Engineering Unleashed Fellows for his approach towards teaching industrial crystallization to undergraduate students.
Fredrik L. Nordstrom is the head of the Solid State Chemistry group and global Crystallization Network at Boehringer-Ingelheim and is located in Ridgefield, CT. His teams are responsible for the identification and characterization of solid forms of Active Pharmaceutical Ingredients (APIs) and intermediates, development of scalable crystallization processes and resolution of solid state issues across the New Chemical Entities (NCE) pipeline. Dr. Nordstrom earned his Ph.D. in 2008 from the Royal Institute of Technology (KTH, Stockholm, Sweden) in Chemical Engineering, on the topic of solution crystallization. He began his industrial career at AbbVie in 2008 and joined Boehringer-Ingelheim in 2016. His research interests are centered on crystalline solid solutions and mechanistic understanding of impurity rejection and solvent entrapment in crystallization. He is the author and co-author of over 70 peer-reviewed publications and patents.
