Particle Size of Pneumatically Conveyed Powders Measured Using Impact Duration

Abstract CSIRO Minerals has developed a technique for measuring particle size in pneumatically conveyed powders [1] by measurement of the acoustic waves produced by particle impacts upon a specially designed transducer. Previous work has focused on using the peak acoustic wave amplitude to determine particle size. This produces a spectrum that is hard to determine the particle size from, as the peak amplitude is a non‐linear function of particle diameter, and is strongly affected by angle of incidence and velocity of the impacting particle. In this paper impact duration measurements are used to overcome these difficulties while retaining the advantages of being able to measure in high solids loadings of up to at least 0.5 kg/m³ of powder. In laboratory tests the impact size monitor's (ISM) results have been correlated with optical diffraction measurements of the mean (by number) powder size with a correlation coefficient of 0.985 and a relative error of 5.5 %. The ISM operated successfully in the laboratory at a loading of 0.5 kg/m³ of powder and measured particles down to 50 microns in size.