Growth kinetics: a thermodynamic approach

The analysis and development of industrial crystallization processes requires knowledge of the kinetics of the crystal growth process. This has led to a large number of studies of crystallization kinetics in a variety of systems. A review of these studies reveals the general use of an empirical power-law model for crystal growth kinetics, along with a variety of different definitions of supersaturation. In this work, supersaturation, the driving force for crystallization has been examined from a thermodynamic perspective and combined with the Burton–Cabrera–Frank crystal growth model to obtain a simplified and consistent method to analyze crystal growth data and obtain kinetics with only a single constant. This method is applied to a number of systems employing kinetic data obtained from the literature and thermodynamic data measured in this laboratory. The results demonstrate the simplicity and utility of the method.