Bulk Material Testing - Particle Attrition

Overview

Why Particle Attrition Testing?

Particle attrition results with friable bulk materials, such as plastic pellets, coffee beans, fertilizer granules and other agglomerated solids, during routine handling.

Particle attrition can be caused by variety of mechanisms including compression, impact, and shear. The effects can be costly, such as increased dusting, powder caking, reduced solubility, decreased product performance, degraded appearance, or even creation of safety hazards like dust explosions.

Typical factors affecting particle attrition include:

Particle hardness
Particle shape and size
Energy of particle impact
Surface impact
Particle bed impact
Surface hardness and roughness
Particle chemistry
Propensity to melt or smear

Granulated sugar turned into powder sugar do to attrition during handling.

Animal feed pellets often pose handling issues due to a propensity for breaking and creating fines.

Approach

Particle Attrition Tests

Your material’s attrition behavior can be determined through the following tests:

Impact: evaluate particle attrition during filling of silos, hoppers, and chutes
Hopper flow: evaluate particle attrition due to funnel or mass flow in a hopper
Compression: evaluate particle attrition due to loads acting on particle or bed
Pneumatic conveying: evaluate particle attrition as function of velocity, loading

Particle attrition tests are performed with a physical model to investigate the effects of major test variables. We measure particle size distributions on pre- and post-attrition test samples or provide samples to your laboratory for proprietary analysis.

Results

Particle Attrition Test Results

The particle attrition test results are presented in detailed report containing:

Description of attrition test equipment and test method
Data presented graphically or in tabular format
Qualitative observations of unique test phenomena
Conclusions and recommendations

A Jenike & Johanson engineer will review the test results with you and answer any of your questions. We will also discuss the application of the attrition test results to your project.

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