A new discretization for tracer population balance equation is developed. It is compared to the modified discretized tracer population balance equation of Peglow et al. [Peglow, M., Kumar, J., Warnecke, G., Heinrich, S., MorI, L., Hounslow, M. J. (2006). Improved discretized tracer mass distribution of Hounslow et al. American Institute of Chemical Engineers, 52, 1326-1332]. The new formulation provides excellent prediction of the tracer mass distribution in all test cases. Furthermore, the new formulation is more efficient from a computational point of view, it takes less computational effort and is able to give a very good prediction for a coarser grid. Additionally, it is independent of the type of grid chosen for computation. For finer grids, both formulations tend to produce the same results. The performance of the new formulation is illustrated by the comparison with various analytically tractable problems. Moreover, the new formulation preserves all the advantages of the modified discretized tracer population balance equation of Peglow et al. [Peglow, M., Kumar, J., Warnecke, G., Heinrich, S., Morl, L., Hounslow, M. J. (2005). Improved discretized tracer mass distribution of Hounslow et al. American Institute of Chemical Engineering (published online: 29 December 2005)] and provides a significant improvement in predicting tracer mass distribution and tracer-weighted mean particle volume during aggregation process. (c) 2006 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.