International Journal of Engineering and Technology

Particle size distribution (PSD) affects properties of particulate materials and is used for denoting their quality and performance. Among many techniques available to measure PSD, many are quite often offline methods and are time consuming. Also methods like sieving involve, handling of the material physically and electromagnetically, which is healthy, if avoided for certain materials. Thus the need for an online PSD analyzer and the advent of digital image processing has rendered the drift for innovation of image based particle analyzers. Also this method is purely inferential as the particles are not handled physically or electromagnetically as in cases like sieve analysis or tomography. In general, PSD estimation is based on considering a single parameter of the particle profile. Irregularities in analyzed particles increase the error in PSD estimation. Hence, two parameters, equivalent area diameter and Feret's diameter are included for the estimation to reduce the estimation error.