Cryst. Growth Des. 2008, 8, 1783
1783
ReViews Additives and Crystallization Processes: From Fundamentals to Applications. By Keshra Sangwal. New York, 2007. 468 pp. $200.00. 978-0-470-06153-4
This book is definitely meeting a demand of the time. There are many books on industrial crystallization, but no book exists on this specific and high-interest topic. Crystallization processes are more and more in the focus not only in the chemical industry but also nowadays in the food and the pharmaceutical industries. Highly pure and tailor-made crystalline products are increasingly being asked for especially by the latter industries. Additives and impurities are therefore of extremely high importance in those fields. Additives as well as impurities mean substances that are not the product substance as such but rather other substances present in the process, however in small quantities. Those substances affect not only the crystalline product itself but also the whole crystallization process. The understanding of the phenomena involved in the changes due to the additives is of great importance. Products today must be produced using stable, reproducible processes with respect to purities, polymorphs/solvates, shapes, and size distributions. There are many aspects of the effects of additives or impurities that have been published in a variety of journals, and certain aspects also appear in recent books. A presentation gathering all aspects of impurities in industrial crystallization, in one book, was missing up to now! In the book all those phenomena resulting from additives and impurities are listed and discussed on the basis of theory or experimental findings: (i) change of solubility (ii) change in width of the metastable zone (iii) change in nucleation kinetics (iv) change in crystal growth kinetics (v) change of crystal form
(vi) change or no change of polymorph (transition points) (vii) change in dissolution behavior (suppressing) (viii) change of purity (additive inclusion) In particular, in those fields in which theories are available and those fields in which the author can support the described findings by any theoretical and experimental background, the chapters provide a well-written and easy-to-follow view on the state of the art knowledge and are indeed an enrichment to the current sequence of books in the field. In those fields of, for example, molecular modeling and form change prediction by additives, however, where there has been big progress in the last several years as well as in the field of polymorphs and solvates, there is much more information available in the existing literature than is covered in the book. Stabilizing polymorphs or solvates by additives as well as the suppression of dissolution of crystals are fields of key interest today when designing products and processes and these topics would have contributed to an even more useful book to the reader. The book did approach, however, definitely the right field of science at the right time and is therefore of great value to the community. It is unfortunately not as complete as the reader would have liked it to be. This is especially true for the citation of the available literature in the field. Nonetheless, the book will find its place on the desk of all researchers and industrial people working in the field of industrial crystallization where there are unavoidable permanent problems with additives or impurities in products or processes. Joachim Ulrich Martin-Luther-UniVersität Halle-Wittenberg
10.1021/cg800192r CCC: $40.75 2008 American Chemical Society Published on Web 03/22/2008
CG800192R 10.1021/cg800192r
