Advanced geometrical modeling of focused beam reflectance measurements (FBRM)

In the past decade the use of focused beam reflectance measurements (FBRM) has been established as an on line and in situ particle characterization technique. However, a model is required to obtain full information from the FBRM signal and to compare the results to other measurement techniques. Different modeling approaches can be found in the literature. All of these assume a laser focus of zero extension, motionless particles and fully opaque particles. It is shown in this work that these assumptions do not hold even for ideally spherical particles. For large, opaque particles, the particle velocity and a depth dependent laser velocity have to be considered. For highly transparent particles, backscattering only occurs near the edges of a crystal. Consequently, two more refined modeling approaches - the velocity model and the edge scattering model - based on Monte-Carlo techniques are developed and verified in this work.