Growth kinetics inhibition in erythritol–mannitol crystallization: Quantitative analysis using deep learning-based image segmentation

• Mannitol addition markedly reduced erythritol crystal size by up to 68%. • Deep learning-based image segmentation (Omnipose) enabled quantitative particle analysis. • XRD confirmed no structural transformation, indicating growth kinetic inhibition. • Erythritol–mannitol crystals deviated below Mersmann’s size–supersaturation correlation.• Growth retardation likely results from impurity adsorption at crystal surfaces. The crystallization behavior of erythritol slurry (ES) and water–erythritol–mannitol slurry (EMS) was investigated to elucidate the effects of relative supersaturation and mannitol addition on crystal growth. A batch-type stirred system was employed, and particle morphology was quantitatively analyzed using deep-learning-based image segmentation (Omnipose). X-ray diffraction (XRD) analysis was performed to identify structural changes. The addition of mannitol significantly reduced the mean crystal diameter from approximately 60 µm in ES to 20 µm in EMS, corresponding to an inhibition rate I R of about 68%. The EMS system also exhibited narrower and more monodisperse size distributions, indicating that mannitol effectively suppressed coarsening. XRD patterns showed no additional peaks compared to the pure erythritol and mannitol systems, confirming the absence of structural transformation. Therefore, reduction in the size of crystallites is attributed to inhibition of their growth kinetics. Comparison with Mersmann’s correlation demonstrated that the ES data followed the expected trend between mean crystal size and relative supersaturation, while the EMS data lay well below the lower limit of the band, reflecting pronounced growth inhibition. Because supersaturation was the same for both the ES system and the EMS system, the difference in particle size is attributed to the growth kinetics reduction rather than to increase in nucleation kinetics. These results suggest that erythritol and mannitol act as mutual impurities, causing pinning at the crystal surface that reduced growth kinetics. The findings provide a fundamental understanding of growth kinetics in polyol-based phase change material slurries, offering design guidance for high-performance thermal transport media.