Consistent powder production is essential for maintaining product quality and customer satisfaction. Particle morphology, moisture content, and porosity directly impact flowability and compressibility, affecting manufacturing efficiency. Advanced atomization technologies like cyclodextrin inclusions can enhance bioavailability by up to 50%, while rapid drying techniques reduce lab testing variability by 95%. Addressing agglomeration and static buildup through pH neutralization and encapsulation improves powder handling, reducing production downtime.
Powder variability presents significant challenges across industries, from pharmaceuticals to food production. Inconsistent particle characteristics lead to manufacturing inefficiencies, product rejections, and customer dissatisfaction. Expert insights reveal how precise particle engineering can solve these issues, ensuring reliable performance in downstream processing.
This discussion covers critical factors like particle morphology control, moisture management, and rapid drying techniques. We’ll examine how advanced technologies improve powder flowability, compressibility, and bioavailability while reducing production costs. Real-world examples demonstrate the financial benefits of investing in high-quality particle engineering.
Readers will gain actionable strategies to optimize powder production, reduce waste, and enhance product consistency. Implementing these techniques can cut costs by up to $1 million annually while improving market competitiveness.
By Hendrik Grobler, Stephen Enloe, Ulli Lindau and Will West | Advanced Powder Dynamics
TL;DR – Quick Summary
Consistency in powder production is crucial for maintaining product quality and customer satisfaction.
Flowability Factors: Particle morphology, moisture content, and porosity are critical factors that determine the flowability and compressibility of powders, impacting manufacturing efficiency.
Bioavailability Enhancement: Using advanced atomization technologies like cyclodextrin inclusions can significantly enhance bioavailability and absorption, allowing for lower doses and potentially reducing raw material costs by up to 50%.
Rapid Drying Benefits: Rapid drying techniques, such as thermal brevity, can prevent product damage and ensure a purer outcome, reducing variations in lab testing by up to 95%.
Agglomeration Solutions: Addressing agglomeration and static buildup issues through pH neutralization, encapsulation, and humidity control can improve powder flow and reduce production downtime.
Engineering ROI: Investing in high-quality particle engineering can extend shelf life, reduce inventory write-offs, and increase overall profitability, with potential savings of up to $1 million per year.
Pro tip: Consider tolerating some agglomeration and flowability issues if the product has high market value, as the increased value can outweigh the minor production challenges.
Importance of Reliable Lab Testing in Product Development
Stephen: Or all of those powders that were in the same batch to a lab, they’re all gonna look different. So when you do a sample to pick them and send them to a lab, there are gonna be all these subtle differences, not to mention the fact that labs have their own differences based on who’s doing the test. Was the sample solution the same? Was it different on a different day? Did they run it for exactly the same amount of time? I mean, we run into this all the time because we send half a dozen things to the lab every day or every other day for our business. There are always variations. But if you’re doing things for half a second at extremely high heat, it comes back to this concept of thermal brevity. You don’t damage the product. You get the purest version of the outcome you want versus something that’s in there rolling around for an extreme amount of time. It’s just bound to turn out differently. And so it’s important to have very good lab partners doing very reliable testing. My point is simple. It’s actually how you create the product. And the conditions through which you put those particles, they’re going to determine so many things. Yes, the testing is important, but it’s actually everything that comes before that that determines 95 % of what happens. Yeah. No, it makes total sense. So moving on to the next question here that we have, which is how can particle engineering improve the flow ability and the compressibility of my powder for better manufacturing efficiency?
Hendrik: So obviously flowability and compressibility is critically important, specifically for post-drying processing. Whether it’s tableting, encapsulating, or just pushing it through hoppers or other equipment to put it in the final delivery package. Consistency of flowability and compressibility is also critically important. Once you’ve created something with specific requirements,. You have to reproduce that every single time. We have heard in the past from customers, typical challenges that they have is they send a product to a CMO, they produce a powder and it works very nice in the post drying processing. But the next time they send it there, they create bridging in the equipment, the flowability is not the same, the moisture content is not the same and the morphology is not the same. The ability to create that every single time is so critically important so that you don’t have comebacks on your product. You can produce a hundred percent successful campaign for a customer from a process and from a product yield perspective. And it passes all the microbial and potency testing at the end of the day. If that product cannot be handled in the post-drying equipment, then they’re gonna reject that product. So the things that are critically important here is particle morphology. So that is specifically consistent shape of the product and the structure of the particle. The more smooth the particle is and the round the particle is, the easier it will flow. The lower the moisture content in the particle, the better it will flow. Porosity in the product or the particle also contributes to is the product gonna be a flowable particle or is it gonna be compressible? If it compresses too much and the particle is too soft, then it also is not gonna go through your equipment.
So those things are critically important. have to have the ability to control. Moisture in the product, the morphology of the particle itself, so that is the shape and the structure of the powder to comply to those specific flow-volatility requirements.
Will: Yeah, the one thing that I’d like to add here is that one critical factor is being able to repeat what you bring to market. Because once you’ve established the specs around the powder and you’re happy with them, you’ve matched them to the application, you have your packaging. Maybe you’re going to market in capsules because you have a nutraceutical product. Maybe you’re going to market in some other form. You’ve got a stick pack because you’re making a drink of some sort, but you’ve got the particle that works for that packaging, that form factor, that market segment, those consumers. You have to be able to repeat the production of that powder time and again, exactly the way it is because. If you have a powder that doesn’t compress the next time, you won’t be able to fit it in the capsules next time. If you have a product that doesn’t flow or you have other issues, it’s not going to work from a solubility point of view with your drink the next time. And so whatever your needs, your specifications are, your partner is going to work with you to get there to the best of their abilities. That’s great. Make sure that. It works beyond the prototyping phase by asking them questions about how am I assured that every single campaign is going to produce this exact outcome so that my customers are satisfied and I’m not getting complaints, I’m not getting returns, I’m not losing this customer down channel after we get it in the market.
Consistency in Product Quality Across Industries
Stephen: Yeah, no, it’s really interesting, honestly, the consistency factor of this. And I know this is a slightly different kind of take on it, but I used to work very closely with a lot of contractors and kind of going back to what Uli was saying before about this being a… Consistency of the product being a factor within many different industries here. Obviously there’s the the nutraceuticals and the different more consumable aspects of this but as well as this I know contractors have within the different solutions and powders and different things and pigments and anything they use I have heard so many of them who will. Absolutely be die-hard for a brand just because of the consistency of, I know that the powder reacts this way. I know that the actual solution of this becomes this when I add this much water, when I’m working with it with this, where it dries in this amount of time, whereas these other brands, it’s all over the place. And it, within that end user, will make a huge difference, which I know, again, a little bit less of. The actual scientific side of this on the nutraceutical and some of the other aspects we’ve talked about with this question, but I’ve seen the consistency of this workout within the end user and I think it does make a huge difference.
Will: I’m sorry, can we take a five or ten minute break? I’ve either got a puppy that desperately needs to go outside or is threatening to eat the cat, one of the two, but it’s driving me crazy here. We’re ahead of schedule, so I hope it’s not a problem to take a few minutes break right now.
Stephen: I think that’s fine with me. so I I’ll go grab a glass of water in the meantime.
Will: Okay. Okay, great. Yeah,. I’ll try and be quick here to the extent the puppy will let me. I’ll be right back. Thanks, guys. Lay down. Lay down. Lay down.
Hendrik: Are the cats still alive?
Will: Yeah, well, the dog only bothers one of the two. And it’s a little bit like, yeah, I forget there’s like black bears and brown bears and you’re not supposed to run from one because that’s when they chase you. So we’ve got two cats and the older cat just ignores the dog. The younger cat will like play and fight and then run. And when it runs, that’s when the dog chases it. So I didn’t wear the older cat is he usually just goes and sleeps in one of the bedrooms during the day Or he’s around me, you know, the gray one that you see sometimes he’s usually around my computer and but he just just ignores the dog and lays there and When he ignores the dog the dog doesn’t do anything the other one Was like sitting on the corner of my desk looking down at the dog as if he was gonna pounce on him and that got the dog’s attention but. Took the dog. Outside and they’re pouring cement still and making a lot of noise and all that did was just distract the dog and took it forever. So, sorry.
Ulli: Question nine.
Will: Nine.
Stephen: We’re getting up there, guys. We’re just flying through these. What I’m really hearing, Will, is that we need to somehow make a dynamic atomization system specifically for cookies for your kids. Then there’s no. More fighting about which cookie. They’re all perfectly made.
Will: Yeah, well my daughter just pulls them out of the oven when no one’s around and steals the one she wants.
Stephen: Early bird gets the worm, huh?
Will: Pretty much.
Cost Implications of Particle Size Reduction Techniques
Stephen: Alright, we’re ready to start things off. So getting over to question nine now, we have what are the cost implications of different particle size reduction techniques and how do I justify the investment? Will, I think you actually touched on this a little bit earlier, but I’m excited to hear the actual answer.
Will: Yeah, I think you can go through all of the granular details of how to do an analysis around this and build a lot of spreadsheets. I would say it comes down to two things categorically when you’re making decisions from an executive suite. The main thing though is that from a brand point of view, from an executive point of view,. If you’re going to build the best products, a brand should be rewarded for that. And I think that’s what companies aspire to do. At least those who are trying to compete at the top or premium into the market. We often see companies advertising using superlatives. We have the best, we have the top, have, you know, whatever their, you know, their category is. Most used highest sales. There’s all sorts of labels on Amazon and in consumer advertising and they hire ambassadors to promote you know why it’s the best or you should use it. The question is do they also have the product to stand behind it? They either do or over time it’ll probably be revealed that they don’t. It works a lot better if they do so they need to engineer the products that support that and that’s where having. The best raw material, meaning highest quality, and the best systems of engineering around those raw materials comes into play. And it’s very hard to make it work if you use… Engineered systems that are inferior in many ways that starts withdrawing. It starts with the delivery, then it continues with the delivery technologies. And I think it is a misconception that some of the absolute best delivery technologies, and we would certainly argue that cyclodextrin inclusions, particularly with the things that Tesseract does in our unique and proprietary and patented delivery systems.
Can do with cyclodextrin technologies as a base or at the pinnacle of that. Does it cost money? It absolutely costs money, but it puts the power from a bioavailability and absorption point of view within those products in a way that significantly differentiates them and allows them to achieve things that the raw materials with other drying systems, with other delivery systems, cannot do. And it certainly varies from a molecule to molecule, product to product point of view. But it’s really remarkable how the cyclodextrin technology, the dynamic atomization technology can allow brands to work with a much broader array of ingredients. Than other drawing or delivery technologies can. Often ingredients that people believed were not addressable because of their taste profile, because of their odor profile, because of their challenges to upsetting the stomach of the patient or the consumer. Because of their inability to be absorbed for any number of reasons. I mean, that’s why Tesseract already has a portfolio of 450 plus nutrients we work with and growing. It’ll probably be a thousand in a year or a year and a half. And many of those are things that are not at all common in the supplement nutraceutical world. Many of them are mainstream, but have asked… Proportion of them or not. And the cost of the raw material actually goes down because with the right technologies, you can use a far lower dose to get an efficacious result for the consumer or the patient. And so you really have to look at the big picture, look at the application and get to the stage of mapping out the formulation.
To understand economically how that cost-of-good-souled picture changes, and then understand that it’s an investment that could actually be quite attractive, given what you’re creating for the market and creating something that few, if any, competitors really have.
Value Proposition of High-Quality Raw Materials and Technologies
Ulli: Yeah, want to add to that, Stephen and Will, because I think it really depends on how you classify the ingredients or the raw material that you are going to consider processing with particle reduction techniques. So there are particular raw materials that are, in general, not really processable. And it’s very difficult to find a technology that is actually able to process them. So those to me are very high value materials. They’re hard to come by, everybody wants them, but they’re difficult to find. You know, very sensitive ingredients, very viscous ingredients, or ingredients that in general haven’t really been considered for particle size reduction. So that could open. An entirely new stream of revenue for any kind of company or brand. So that to me is a very interesting area because depending on the particle size reduction, not only can you optimize what you are already doing with your ingredients, you could potentially open up a new market segment that currently does not exist in this form. And the supplement world will touch on it very briefly. There are ingredients that are extremely difficult to work with despite the fact that they’re very beneficial in the health and wellness space. And so being able to produce them, being able to produce them in a way that the consumer won’t mind taking them, I think is a really powerful argument in the marketplace. Now, there are other components to this equation because we’re really talking about math here, right? How much more am I spending? How much more revenue or what am I saving on the other side. And Hendrik talked about it. It has to do with manufacturability.
A powder that flows better through your manufacturing equipment, no matter what that powder is, will automatically speed up the number of units you can produce or process in the same time period. It will automatically reduce downtime of the machines. It will automatically reduce the non-productive hours of your staff. So those are all things to take into consideration. At the same time, when we look at not flowability, but we look at the extended shelf life, which definitely applies to dynamic atomization, but specifically applies to cyclodextrin. If you know that in your current environment, you write off a million dollars in inventory every two years,. If you can stretch that to half that amount every three years, the equation becomes so heavily loaded toward that new technology that it’s a no-brainer because you are saving so much money every year as your company rolls forward and you go through the inventory. It’s really a very easy capital expenditure calculation to do.
Stephen: Yeah, and it seems like even with the other aspects of this, even like what Will was talking about too in the very beginning when we were kind of touching on this in the original question where the actual active ingredient becomes a smaller ratio of things that it ends up possibly in certain circumstances being a neutral in cost anyways. That factor. Alone mixed with all of these other different things makes it seem like such a no-brainer like what you were saying, Lily. Yeah. So we’re actually coming up on our last question and then we’re gonna have a couple of topics that I’ll just throw out there to you guys as well that I think are some popular topics that people want to know more about as well. But the last question we have for today is how can I troubleshoot common particle engineering challenges like agglomeration and static buildup as well as poor powder flow?
Hendrik: So first is to determine what influences agglomeration and static and build up in the dryer. What is the determining factors here? And most of the time it is what are you putting into the dryer? What is the liquid feed product characteristics? Is it the viscosity? Is it the last of medic properties? Is it the pH? pH for example,. The more acidic, the more sticky the product becomes. If there’s more, if there’s higher bricks in the product, the more sticky it will become. Is it prone to temperature that makes it stick to the drain chamber? And then obviously there are things like the agroscopicity of the material. The more agroscopic it is,. The more difficult it will be to convey through the system, the more prone it would be to agglomeration inside the process. There are different ways to address these issues. First is on the formulation side. What can you do to address these issues? Is there pH neutralization on the liquid side? Is there an encapsulation method that you can apply? And then what can you do from a particle size perspective to make the product more flowable? The smaller the particle, obviously the more flowable it is. The morphology is important. That will make it more flowable. And then how do you address the hygroscopicity issue? Can you maintain, for example, the humidity inside the drain chamber? The rapidness of drying the product also plays a huge role. The quicker you dry the product, the quicker you can get the moisture out of the product, the less thick it will become. Lower moisture, more flowable. Those things are critically important when you want to choose your atomization technology. And again, like we discussed previously, our technology.
With a completely different approach from the conventional atomization technologies address these issues. We can feed higher viscosity material. That means you can increase the particle size if you have to. We have high atomization energy that we can apply if you want to make a smaller particle. We can address the formulation side, whatever microencapsulation technology you apply. Our technology to support that technology, specifically on the side with Dexon complex technology where you encapsulate the product into a cage and that will support the conveyance because now you have smaller particles that’s protected against heat, protected against stickiness and so forth. And that is why you can increase the general conveyance through the. The process and reducing those agglomeration issues, the stickiness issues, and also the static issues.
Will: There’s also, Stephen, some very unconventional things that we’re experimenting with with clients now on a regular basis. For instance, when we have flowability issues, it often has to do with the lipid content of the material that’s being dried. And clients always want to dry things that are very high concentration, you know, for obvious reasons. It’s more value. For the throughput time in the dryers. And so, for example, one of the unconventional things that we’ve done is we’ve formulated hybrid formulations. And so a portion of what’s being dried is actually cyclodextrin based in one example. And the remaining portion is a variation of the original formulation, which uses another agent in the formulation. And so we’re… We’re essentially creating alternative products or at least formulations around that original approach, which has the outcome of changing and improving the flow, potentially giving them new alternative skews for not only the customer segments, but if it works well and works with the existing customers and meets their expectations, then they can take it to potentially new markets. But I actually have a second suggestion here, which is for the customers who are asking this question about how they can change the agglomeration, et cetera. Usually they’re doing that because they’re having production problems and they need to meet certain yield expectation to hit their numbers. My suggestion is consider a radical alternative, which is don’t, don’t change it, or at least don’t try to hit. The ultimate goal that you have in mind. Try the differing approach of tolerating some agglomeration, tolerating some flowability issues. Consider radically upgrading the value of what you’re producing. Because the yield target is ultimately a financially. The yield target is a plug financially in the broader equation where what matters.
Is the output and the value and margin of the output in the market you’re trying to serve. And if you can radically upgrade the value of the product you’re making, then it’s okay to tolerate some flowability issues and some reduced yield. Now, obviously you don’t want an awful yield, but I can tell you Tesseract has this problem sometimes with our own products. 95 % of the time, the ingredients we try to react in cyclodextrin inclusions, they tend to work. That’s the brilliance of Al Zapp and the fact that we can generally work out before we try them even on our R&D line whether or not they’re going to work. But there’s some things that we struggle with like any other business, even sophisticated ones. But sometimes things just don’t convey well. And we know what the limits are, but some things we create have such high value that we simply tolerate some. Agglomeration, some flowability issues, et cetera, and I tell the team, produce it anyhow, because I want it in the market. And if you have products that create that much value, that’s exactly the decision that executive teams are going to come to. So if you’re worried about the agglomeration and the flowability, maybe the problem is actually your product doesn’t have enough value.
Advanced Topics in Particle Engineering and Microencapsulation
Stephen: That’s interesting. We have the five topics of advanced particle engineering techniques, particle size reduction methods, microencapsulation applications, powder flow and handling optimization. Analytical testing and particle characterizations. So anything that you want to add that you might think would be like a little tidbit of information might be useful and go for it. If not, we can end it here.
Ulli: We talked about all of these.
Stephen: I think we did. I think we did.
Will: Yeah. Yeah.
Stephen: Alright, I think we. Covered all of them then. I mean, unless there’s…
Will: Yeah, I think this was a good discussion.
Stephen: Yeah, okay, great. Well, thank you guys for another conversation about this stuff. I know this got really technical, but at the same time, I think there was a lot of very, very tangible and applicable answers to a lot of these technical questions.
Will: And thank you, Stephen, for giving me a new metaphor around baking chocolate chip cookies that can upgrade my communication with the executive suite.
Stephen: I’m here to help dumb things down if I need to.
Will: Yep. If I. See you in person soon, I’m ordering chocolate chip cookies for dessert.
Ulli: You should bring them!
Stephen: Perfect.
Will: If I bring them, they will not make it to the meeting.
Stephen: Perfect. Well, thanks guys. think that that is it. We’ll stop the recording there.
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