(62ax) Flow Variability in Continuous Powder Feeders

Continuous processing of powder blends has the ability to control disturbances online, avoiding the loss of valuable processing materials and enabling effective process control. As part of this product development process, research efforts have focused on examining and optimizing the production of homogeneous solid mixtures, which requires consistent feeding of the individual components. Minimizing variability of the individual components in a powder blend product requires the close study of feeding performance in order for optimization. This work seeks to look at the feeding of a Loss-in-Weight feeder to find maximum feed rate as well as the performance at several intermediate federates for different feeder conditions. To obtain a consistent flow rate it is necessary to optimize feeder performance by selection of the proper feeder tooling (screw, screen). In order to evaluate flow variability, automated sampling was used which involves a precision scale with output to a computer. The Schenck AccPro II scale was used to record the weight every 1 s for three materials flowing through a Gericke GLD feeder. The feeder configurations that are examined are open helixes without center rods and closed augers of three different sizes. The data collected from the feeder showed that proper selection of the screw type and size has a significant impact on the capacity and performance of the feeder.