When walking through the grocery store and picking up a bag of flour or sugar, you’ve probably never thought about the process that it took to get these items packaged. The small particle size of these materials requires specialized handling to ensure there is minimal damage or loss, which is called pneumatic conveying.
A pneumatic conveying system works by moving the material through an enclosed conveyor line using a combination of pressure differential and the flow of air (or another gas) from a blower or fan. Pneumatic conveying systems can be used to transport cement, starch, sugar, salt, polymers, plastic powder, and other powdered/granular bulk materials. The two most common forms of pneumatic conveying systems are dilute phase and dense phase.
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