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An application is a job, not a machine.
Each page here takes one job in one industry, explains what makes it difficult, and shows which equipment combinations solve it.
127 published
Application
In a food plant the valve is judged by how fast it can be opened, cleaned and put back.
Allergen changeover and residue in a valve pocket cause more recalls than mechanical failure does, and fragile products are damaged by the same clearances that keep the air out.
Application
In a grain or feed mill the airlock under a filter is often expected to do two jobs: discharge dust and stop an explosion from travelling.
Only a valve that is specifically designed and certified does the second, and assuming it is the most common mistake in these plants.
Application
In mineral plants a valve is a consumable with a service life measured in months.
The design question is not whether it will wear but whether it can be replaced quickly and whether the wear is confined to parts that were meant to take it.
Application
Pet food plants combine two opposite duties in one line: a fragile, oily finished product and hard, abrasive mineral premixes.
A valve that is gentle enough for coated kibble wears quickly on mineral blends, and a valve built for abrasion breaks the kibble.
Application
In pharmaceutical production the valve is a documented component before it is a mechanical one.
Its containment performance, its cleaning procedure and its material certificates all have to survive an inspection, and none of that is visible in a catalogue photograph.
Application
In plastics the valve is where pellets get cut and where contamination enters.
A sheared pellet becomes a fine or a streamer, and both end up in the extruder as a defect rather than as product.
Application
Power plants ask one valve to handle two difficult materials: ash that floods and fuel that can catch fire.
Aerated fly ash passes a rotary valve far faster than its nominal volume, while biomass fibre wraps around anything that turns.
Nobody buys a rotary valve. They buy a way to get flour out of a silo without losing air pressure.
Equipment catalogues are organised by machine, because that is how machines are built and sold. Plants are organised by job, because that is how problems arrive. Somebody has to unload a tanker, feed a press, keep a baghouse from blinding or stop dust escaping at a transfer point.
This section follows the second order. Each page names a job, in a named industry, and works from the duty to the equipment.
A conveying line sized for the average rate fails at the peak. A feeder sized for the nominal recipe cannot hold tolerance at the smallest addition. The first question on any application page is therefore the range, not the figure: the lowest rate, the highest rate, and how often each occurs.
Most jobs need a chain, and the weakest link decides the result. A vacuum receiver that cannot clean its filter will starve the feeder below it, whatever the feeder is capable of. A silo that bridges makes the discharge equipment irrelevant.
Where a page recommends equipment, it names the interface as well: what has to be true upstream and downstream for the machine to perform as specified.
The same job has different constraints in different industries. Bulk bag discharge in a food plant has to be cleanable and allergen-segregated. In a cement works, the same job is about wear and dust. In pharmaceuticals, it is about containment and validation.
That is why the pages are written by job and industry together, rather than by job alone.
If you know the job, start here and follow the links into the technologies it uses. If you know the material, start from the material pages and arrive at the same place from the other side. If you know the machine, the technology pages are the way in.
Every application page carries the same structure: the problem as operators describe it, the result a good design delivers, how the job is normally arranged, the factors that decide the selection, and the failure modes that show up when one of them was missed.
They do not size equipment. Sizing needs measured material properties, the real duty cycle and the plant layout, and it belongs with the supplier who will stand behind the result.
What they do is shorten the distance between a problem and the right question. Most bad installations are not bad machines; they are machines selected against the wrong duty, or installed without the condition that made them work in the reference plant.
Most arguments between a plant and a supplier come from a duty that was never written down properly. Five lines prevent them.
Dilute phase conveying carries material suspended in air and needs a velocity above the saltation point, which for most powders puts it in the range of roughly fifteen to thirty metres per second. Dense phase moves material as slugs at a fraction of that, typically single digits.
The difference is not a preference. High velocity breaks fragile product and erodes bends; low velocity needs more pressure and a vessel rather than a blower. Fragile or abrasive material pushes the choice towards dense phase, long distances and high rates towards dilute.
A volumetric feeder meters a volume and assumes a density. A gravimetric feeder weighs, and therefore holds tolerance when the density changes. Wherever the recipe tolerance is tighter than the density variation of the material, the question is already answered.
Capture happens at the source or it does not happen. Extraction volume follows the open area and the face velocity needed to hold dust in, not the size of the machine, and a hood that is too far away cannot be fixed with a bigger fan.
Across every job on this site, the same four causes account for most of what goes wrong after commissioning.
None of these is exotic, and all four are cheap to prevent at the specification stage and expensive to fix afterwards. Each application page names the ones that apply to that job.
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