The inspiration for translating this classic text came during a
sabbatical year spent at the University of Karlsruhe in 1974. Under the
leadership of the late Professor Hans Rumpf, the Institut fUr
Mechanische Verfahrenstechnik, Karlsruhe, from the early 1960s onwards,
by extensive research and advanced teaching had promoted the discipline
of mechanical process technology, a branch of process engineering which
had been rather neglected, especially in many chemical engineering
depart- ments of universities in the English-speaking world. There is a
need for texts of this kind, particularly for the more specialized
teaching that has to be done during the later stages of engineering
courses. This work, which is really a monograph, serves as a concise and
compact introduction, albeit at an advanced level, to all those
functions of process engineering that have to do with the handling and
treatment of particulate matter and bulk solids. Much of this
information has previously been scattered around journals and other
books and not brought together in one work. Furthermore, Rumpf has
emphasized the physical and theoretical foundations of the subject and
avoided a treatment that is simply empirical.