The relationship between Hosokawa Micron and measuring instruments

When dealing with objects, it is necessary to quantify and understand their properties. For example, length, weight and hardness are important. With powders, these are difficult to express well (even weight can be measured in many different ways and according to many different standards), but the ease with which a powder can flow is a parameter of particular industrial importance. For example, when you put powder into a container or a bag, the ease with which it flows will affect how much of it you can put into the bag. For example, easy flowing powders such as plant seeds or sand can be easily put into a variety of containers. However, powders such as flour and white powdered sugar, which are difficult to pour into containers, may fall in clumps or become airborne, making them difficult to pour into containers. And even if they do, there are too many gaps in the jar to hold a lot of powder. The trouble is that the flowability of the same powder can vary according to its size, shape, humidity and other external conditions. For this reason, measuring flowability is of great industrial importance.
However, while it is easy to measure the fluidity of easy flowing powders (e.g. by placing them in a funnel and measuring the time it takes for them to fall), there is a problem with hard flowing powders: they get stuck and do not fall. There is a method of expressing the fluidity of such powders, but this method has the problem that the measured value is too small for easy flowing powders, or that it is difficult to see the difference between easy flowing powders.

We were looking for a method to evaluate the flowability of any powder, when we came across a paper by an American. The method was empirical, not theoretical, but it had the advantage that it gave values close to those of human perception for many powders. But proposed methods used a wide range of equipment to measure a variety of parameters, and the descriptions were ambiguous. This is why, in direct contact with the authors of the paper, the "Micromeritcis Lab" has succeeded in developing a single device to quantify the flowability of powders. This is the Powder Tester, of which more than 4,000 units have now been sold worldwide. The method he proposed is known as Carr's method and the values obtained by his method are known as Carr's index or indexes and are used throughout the world. It has now grown to such an extent that the name "Powder Tester Method" is used in papers to indicate that the measurements were obtained using this instrument.

Since the development of this instrument, it has become a technology that forms part of our powder technology chain. As measurement is an essential part of the development of powder engineering, we continue to research and develop various types of equipment in accordance with the purpose for which the institute was founded: "to contribute to the study and investigation of powder processing engineering and its industrialisation".