Flow analysis and measurement

Flow analysis and measurement allow us to characterize how a product moves under the influence of gravity or mechanical stress. This property is essential for understanding the actual behavior of a material during handling, packaging, shaping, or application. Indispensable in the human food, cosmetics, animal nutrition, and plant and technical powder industries, flow measurement provides key information on the fluidity, cohesion, transport capacity, stability, and transformation of products.

Importance of analysis

Poor flow can lead to numerous industrial problems: equipment clogging, dosing errors, inconsistent mixing, poor homogeneity, difficulty in shaping, and productivity losses. Flow analysis helps identify these adverse behaviors, optimize processes, and select the most suitable formulations. It is also essential for ensuring the repeatability of industrial operations, guaranteeing the quality of finished products, and anticipating variations related to humidity, particle size, density, or temperature. For food or cosmetic powders, flow directly affects ease of dosing, transport, and compaction. For pastes and creams, it influences the user experience, texture, and application performance.

Analytical methods

The techniques used depend on the nature of the product: powder, paste, cream, or thick liquid.
For powders, the most common methods include:

• the flow time through an orifice (Hall funnel, Marsh funnel) to assess fluidity
• Analysis of the angle of repose to measure cohesion and static stability
• tests carried out with a Powder Flow Tester to characterize compressibility, cohesion, interaction forces and behavior in silos

For pasty or semi-solid products, rheometry allows for a detailed characterization of viscoelastic properties, viscosity, yield stress, and shear behavior.
These various analyses provide a comprehensive understanding of product behavior under real manufacturing conditions.

Analyzed matrices

The matrices analyzed include a wide variety of products: food powders (flours, proteins, dry mixes, spices), cosmetic powders, plant-based ingredients, technical powders, extruded products, granules, creams, pasta, animal feed products, sludge, and thick suspensions. They concern raw materials, intermediate formulations, and finished products.

Interest for professionals

For manufacturers, formulators, distributors, and engineering firms, flow measurement is a strategic tool for: optimizing manufacturing processes, adjusting formulations to improve flowability, qualifying new ingredients, controlling batch quality and stability, preventing equipment blockages, reducing production losses, and improving product application performance. R&D teams use this data to develop products that are easier to mix, dose, or apply, while quality departments rely on these analyses to document the conformity and performance of raw materials.

YesWeLab Expertise

YesWeLab collaborates with expert laboratories in rheology, powder analysis, and materials behavior. Our partners, most of whom are certified or accredited (ISO 17025, COFRAC), have specialized equipment for flow measurement, rheometry, and physical property analysis. Depending on your product and needs, we select the most suitable tests and provide comprehensive support, from method definition to results delivery. Thanks to our digital platform, manufacturers benefit from a seamless, fast, and structured service to improve quality and optimize processes.

Other relevant analyses from the YesWeLab catalogue

• Analysis of powder cohesion
• Particle size measurement
• Advanced rheological analysis (oscillation, shear)
• Viscosity measurement
• Study of the stability of emulsions and suspensions