This e-mail is to announce that John Austin will be defending his dissertation, Investigation into the Use of Microwave Resonance Sensors to Monitor Particulate Manufacturing Processes, on Friday, March 28th, at 1:00 in FRNY 3062B. The dissertation is being directed by Dr. Harris, and the abstract is below. All are welcome to attend. Knowledge of a material's properties in-line during manufacture is of critical importance to many industries, including the pharmaceutical industry, and can be used for either process or quality control. Different microwave sensor configurations were tested to determine both the moisture content and the bulk density in pharmaceutical powders during processing on-line. Although these parameters can significantly affect a material's flowability, compressibility, and cohesivity, in the presence of blends, the picture is incomplete. Due to the ease with which particulate blends tend to segregate, blend uniformity and chemical composition are two critical parameters in nearly all solids manufacturing industries. The prevailing wisdom has been that microwave sensors are not capable of or sensitive enough to measure the relative concentrations of components in a blend. Consequently, it is common to turn to near infrared sensing to determine material composition on-line. In this study, a novel microwave sensor was designed and utilized to determine, separately, the concentrations of different components in a blend of pharmaceutical powders. This custom microwave sensor was shown to have comparable accuracy to the state-of-the-art for both chemical composition and moisture content determination. Catherine Field, Ph.D. Graduate Program Administrator/Counselor School of Chemical Engineering Forney Hall of Chemical Engineering, Room 1051 480 Stadium Mall Drive West Lafayette, Indiana 47907-2100 Phone: 765-494-4057 Fax: 765-494-0805 Email: field2@purdue.edu<mailto:field2@purdue.edu> Website: www.engineering.purdue.edu/ChE<http://www.engineering.purdue.edu/ChE>