Industry-university interaction for the development of innovations

This technical report exemplifies a collaborative work between an academic research center and a company and highlights the importance of incentives for innovation. Pneumatic conveying is a highly diffused industrial process for material displacement, commonly disposing of pressure vessels of high design complexity, making its installation expensive. This work describes preliminary results of an industrial prototype designed to act as a feeder of particulate solids, having as the hypothesis that, with low complexity in comparison to a traditional pressure vessel, it is possible to dictate the transport rate and energy efficiency just controlling the opening time of dosing valves. This equipment was employed in a pneumatic conveyor system which has been submitted to a dense phase transport. The tests were implemented using as the transported material alumina in state of powder and, by fixing the time of dosage, it is possible to impose a transport cycle duration. The maximum value of transport rate obtained in the test parameters was 2.25ton /h for the transport cycle of 45s in a transport line with 130m of extension, and 3" of diameter. The experimental model validation proved to be a valuable opportunity for innovation research and development for both university and company.