Agriculture, animal feed and horticulture

Powder flow behaviour plays a critical role in agricultural products such as fertilisers, pesticides, and powdered additives. Consistent flow ensures accurate dosing, efficient processing, and reliable application in the field.

Understanding how these materials behave under different conditions helps prevent handling issues and improves overall product performance.

Dynamic powder testing with the Powder Flow Analyser captures how these materials behave under the kind of movement, stress, and history they actually experience in production and storage. Texture Analyser tests complement this by measuring the mechanical strength of caked or compacted material - relevant both to assessing whether cakes will break up during spreading, and to evaluating granule or pellet robustness.

View examples of published work:

Feed additive consisting of vermiculite for all poultry and ornamental birds, all porcine species, equines, leporids, camelids, pets and other non-food-producing animals 

• Grass seed is the most moderate of the three samples across all parameters: relatively low cohesion, low dynamic resistance, and a speed ratio close to 1.0, meaning its packing and flow behaviour changes very little with speed. It forms a moderate cake fraction (0.63) but at a relatively low strength – suggesting that any consolidation during storage is unlikely to result in hard lumps that resist break-up during spreading. For a free-flowing agricultural material, this is a benign profile: predictable across a range of handling conditions.
• Wheatbran shares a similar baseline resistance to grass seed but shows a meaningfully higher Flow Stability index of 1.37, indicating that its behaviour changes progressively during repeated movement  a pattern consistent with gradual breakdown or structural rearrangement of the bran particles under repeated stress. Its cake strength is notably higher than grass seed (~178 g), meaning that storage-induced consolidation is a more significant risk: wheatbran that has sat in a silo or bin for an extended period may discharge quite differently from freshly loaded material.
• Bird sand is the most striking sample on this page by a considerable margin. Its Bridging Factor of 2601 is extreme – far above the other two samples – and its compaction coefficient at low speed is also the highest of the three, indicating that the material offers substantial resistance to initial movement. It also becomes harder to move as speed increases (speed ratio 1.40, the only sample on this page above 1.0) and its Flow Stability of 1.68 confirms that behaviour continues to evolve during repeated passes. In practice, a material with this combination of properties is prone to hopper stoppages, difficult restart after dwell, and increasing resistance during high-throughput spreading operations.

Powder Flow Analyser – dynamic behaviour

Texture Analyser – strength and compaction

Powder problems are driven by movement, stress, and time. Dynamic flow and strength-based testing reveal behaviours that static tests cannot capture.