Your entire operation hinges on one thing: moving bulk materials. It’s the circulatory system of your facility, the process that takes raw goods and gets them where they need to go. When it works, your plant hums along. When it doesn’t, everything grinds to a halt. A big part of solid material handling is getting familiar with the common challenges you might face. Only then will you be able to ensure professional and efficient performance all year round.
The Dreaded Hopper Clog (Arching & Bridging)
You’ve seen it happen. You have a silo full of material, but nothing is coming out of the discharge outlet. You look inside, and the material has formed a solid, stable arch right over the opening. Or maybe it’s a “rat-hole,” where material flows only through a narrow channel in the center, leaving most of your product stuck to the sides.
This forces your team to stop what they’re doing and try to break the clog manually. You see the hammer marks on the side of your expensive equipment. This kind of downtime kills your daily targets and throws your entire schedule off.
Dealing With Dust Clouds and Product Loss
Some materials, especially fine powders, tend to become airborne. This creates a haze in your facility that’s more than just a cleaning headache. Fugitive dust is lost product, which is lost money floating away in the air. It also creates a hazardous work environment and can lead to serious compliance issues.
That dust settles on everything, getting into the moving parts of other machines and causing premature wear. A poorly contained material handling system actively damages your other assets and represents a constant loss of inventory that your inventory management software can’t even track properly.
Inconsistent Particle Size Creates Chaos
Your process is likely built for a specific particle size distribution. But what happens when you get large, agglomerated chunks and clumps mixed in with your fine powder? It’s like trying to make a cake when half your flour is in hard, fist-sized blocks. The final product mix is off, and downstream equipment chokes. These oversized lumps can block screens, jam rotary valves, and throw off the accuracy of volumetric feeders.
Abrasive Materials: The Slow Grind That Kills Productivity
Some materials are just plain aggressive. They act like liquid sandpaper flowing through your system, slowly wearing away every surface they touch. You see it on the flights of a screw conveyor, the inside of a chute, or the components of a valve. The constant abrasion leads to unexpected equipment failures and emergency repairs. You’re forced into reactive maintenance instead of planned work, and the downtime is always more expensive than you think.
Moisture and Caking Is Your Product’s Worst Enemy
You have a perfectly good, free-flowing material sitting in a hopper or a bag. But over time, it absorbs a little humidity from the air. Suddenly, it’s not a powder anymore. It’s a solid, rock-hard block. This caking and agglomeration is a huge problem in many industries. This solidified material refuses to move through your conveyor system. It clogs openings, puts immense strain on motors, and can even damage your equipment when it tries to force the solid mass through.
Slow and Steady Loses the Race: Inefficient Transport
Getting material from point A to point B may seem simple, but using the wrong method can become a massive bottleneck for your entire operation. Maybe your transport system is too slow, or perhaps it requires too much manual labor, like moving bag after bag on a pallet.
An inefficient flow starves the rest of your production line. Your high-capacity mixer or packaging machine sits idle, waiting for material. This kind of bottleneck throttles your facility’s output, showing that even the best individual machines are only as good as the system that feeds them.
Stop Fighting Your Materials and Start Processing Them
These challenges are real, and they cost you time and money every single day. JERSEY CRUSHER delivers the heavy-duty equipment that industry leaders use to solve these exact problems. Our lump breakers and lump abradors turn those caked-up bricks back into valuable, usable material right in your process line. Our rugged screw conveyor systems and volumetric feeders are built to handle tough materials and keep your line moving at the speed you need. Talk to JERSEY CRUSHER and get the right machinery to master your material flow.
