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Back to Basics: Understanding the Flow of Powders and Bulk Solids

Knowing how materials discharge from hoppers, and what the catalysts are for causing jams, is essential education in working with powders and bulk solids for food production.

Flour Powder
Powders, like this flour, are susceptible to environmental conditions like heat and humidity that can slow the flow of product through hoppers and silos during processing.
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Processing professionals know it’s a lifelong lesson about how best to store and move powders and bulk solids through hoppers and funnels, and how elements like shape, weight, humidity, and other conditions can dictate whether those materials are transferred as intended or become stuck and block production.

Eric Maynard, vice president at Jenike & Johanson, has been working with bulk powders and solids for almost 30 years, and at the 2023 Powder Show, Maynard gave those new to the industry a crash course on the basics, along with essential terminology to understanding this ever-challenging segment of processing.

“Poor solids handling can directly affect production costs,” Maynard says. “We see this with food, pharmaceuticals, wood, plastics…all these types of industries have challenges with poor powder and bulk solids handling, and their time to market could be affected as well as worker safety.”

Maynard detailed food and non-food materials in his presentation, but the basic principles of powder and bulk solids apply across the board. Here are some of his foundational takeaways, useful for both longtime pros needing a refresher, and those just starting in the industry.

Liquid versus solid

The first area Maynard covered was to understand the fundamental difference between liquid handling and solids handling. “Liquids have no internal friction—it’s incompressible and it can’t form a pile. That makes it fantastic for us to move. Solids have internal friction and can form piles, so that boundary friction has a big effect on why solids are different from liquids,” Maynard says.

   Watch some of the newest innovations in dry processing and more from the 2023 Interpack show. 

Funnel flow and mass flow

There are two main forms of flow with powders and bulk solids, according to Maynard: funnel flow and mass flow. Of the two, mass flow is generally the preferred discharge, since mass flow is a true first-in/first-out method leaving nothing behind in the hopper.

Funnel flow is where “you look from the top [of the hopper] and the material is funneling down through itself, rather than flowing along the walls of the hopper,” says Maynard. “Easily 90% of hoppers in our industry are funnel flowing.”

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