Quieter, Cleaner Flow: How to Stabilize Pneumatic Conveying This Week

If you’ve ever increased air “just to be safe” and watched throughput drop—or avoided a blower room pushing 120 dBA—you’re not alone. Most conveying issues come down to four fundamentals: material behavior, line feeding, air delivery, and receiver separation. When these are aligned, alarms quiet down, rates stabilize, and operators stop treating the blower room like a hazard zone.

For a deeper dive into these fundamentals, download the free Troubleshooting Pneumatic Conveying Systems white paper. It includes field diagnostics and a sample system characteristic curve you can use as a benchmark.

Sample Convey System Characteristic Curve image

Fixing Flow Starts with Air Control

More air isn’t always better. Excess volume can spike velocity, waste energy, and reduce capacity. Before changing hardware, try trimming volume while monitoring rate, pressure, and receiver differential. This simple test often reveals if you're moving too much gas for the solids.

Pulsation is another hidden issue—it raises noise, wears out bearings, and disrupts instrumentation. The HeliFlow® Twisted Tri-Lobe design smooths pressure pulses, lowering noise and extending component life—benefits you can hear and measure.

Right-Sizing the Blower

Gardner Denver’s portfolio— Sutorbilt Legend, DuroFlow, HeliFlow, and CycloBlower HE—lets you match rate, pressure, footprint, and noise targets without over-spec’ing. PD blowers deliver consistent volume per revolution, ideal for dilute-phase runs with shifting system pressure.

Start with a quick assessment:

Confirm the material is suited to the conveying mode
Check for leaks at line charger and joints
Compare feeder delivery to bulk density
Review receiver media, air-to-cloth ratio, and ΔP trends

These basics often explain recurring plugs, rate drops, and high ΔP.

Optimize for Stability and Longevity

Use actual rate, line length, elbow count, and pressure—not legacy specs. If operators are near the skid, prioritize low pulsation. For finer control, consider VFD-equipped packages.

If elbows wear out fast or plugs form in the same spot, reduce velocity and revisit bends, slopes, and diameter transitions. Small layout tweaks can yield big stability gains.

Proof in Practice: JM Huber

In a calcium carbonate facility, blower room noise dropped from 120 dBA to below 90 dBA after switching to HeliFlow. Blower life extended by 100–150%, improving safety and uptime.

Take the next step:

Download the white paper—Troubleshooting Pneumatic Conveying Systems—for practical field methods and a system characteristic curve you can compare to your line.

Read the JM Huber case study to see how lowering pulsation and noise also improved reliability and blower life.

Explore PD blower options and connect with an authorized distributor when you want help translating diagnostics into a scoped trial on your line.

Talk to an Expert