POWDER, PELLET, FLAKE, GRANULE: Which are you handling?

Bulkagram 2, April 14

Powder, pellet, flake, granule, nugget, particle, bean, grain…..

As you sit in your office, walk down your shopfloor or banter with friends in a coffee shop, how much of these shapes influence your life?

Here’s a teeny weeny look:

Coffee in the morning, powder from beans to pep your day up.

A hurried bowl of cornflakes, flakes of processed corn.

Commute to work, pellets of ABS in your car bumper keeping you safe.

Plastics of the airbags lying in wait to protect you.

The glass of water as you run through your .ppt for the bosses, grains of sand melted in the glass furnace.

Pasta at the Italian place for lunch, powder of the wheat flour making it.

Endless phone calls and keyboard fatigue, glass and engineering plastics making up the phone.

And that refreshing evening glass of beer or a stimulating shot of whisky, processed hops and malt grain. 

And as you get to bed, you are lulled by the muted colours on the bedroom ceiling: chemical powders to make the paint. 

All bulk materials to begin with.

The list goes on.

The technology that unites these elementary shapes and morphs them into the everyday things that make your life lies in the broad expanse and massive footprint of what we call bulk materials handling. An industry that the sun can never set on.

Dry bulk materials like the above are best conveyed pneumatically (one part of the larger “handling” system) albiet with many riders thrown in. From experience of the past 30 years, I have found that pneumatic conveying systems have a love hate relationship with customers using them. For the most part “failures” have more to do with improper match of the various parameters that contribute to efficient and reliable conveying. Here both vendors and customers have to share the responsibility for tainting the name of pneumatic conveying.

Choked pipelines, low throughput, excessive dust generation, particle breakage are some problems that arise more due to the elephant and the blind men than the science and technology of pneumatic conveying.