“Send us a five-gallon bucket and we will run a trial of your material” – every other major OEM
If you’ve ever sent your powder out for a “trial” before buying a sifting or sieving machine, you probably got a short video and a line that said, “It ran great.” The sample looks fine, the screen looks clean, and everything seems to work. But what happens when that same machine runs for hours in a production environment?
At Elcan Industries, we see and hear about it all the time from our customers. A company buys a unit based on a 60-second test, installs it on their plant floor, and within a few hours, its blinding screens, slowing down throughput, producing out-of-spec powder, breaking screen meshes, and so much more. These short, feasibility tests are being used to mimic how equipment will perform in a plant setting and it ends up costing companies thousands of dollars when they realize that the machine simply cannot replicate the results they were told they would have during their “60 second” material trial.
If you’ve already done a trial, here’s how to tell whether it was a real evaluation or just a sales demo.
1. The Test Lasted Less Than a Few Minutes
A short test is the number one red flag. Most conventional equipment tests last under a minute, just long enough to show powder moving through a clean screen. What they don’t show you is what happens once the material starts building up, when heat, static, and fines begin to change the behavior of the powder. Then the results of this small trial are multiplied to calculate daily and weekly output, but this type of testing does not actually reflect real world run-time in a production setting.
At Elcan Industries, we run full-day trials using your actual material. These tests run for hours, not seconds, so you can see how the machine performs under continuous loads. You’ll know how it handles real production conditions, not just a clean lab sample that runs for less than a few minutes. Send us a supersack! is what we like to say, and we will send you back your materials ready for production and proven out for an industrial plant scale.
2.The Powder Flowed Well, But Only at the Beginning
If your powder flowed perfectly for the first minute, but no data is showing what happened later, again, that’s not a real test. Many ultrasonic or vibratory machines start strong but slow down as the screen fills with powder. Once that happens, throughput drops, when the screen blinding begins and also conveniently, where the testing ends.
During Elcan’s day-long trials, the Hi-Sifter maintains steady performance from start to finish. Its vertical, high-energy motion keeps powders like Titanium, Inconel, Aluminum, Molydenum, Carbon Black and many other powders fluidized across the entire mesh surface, preventing buildup and maintaining consistent yields for hours i.e. a production setting which is what most companies want and need.
3. They Increase the Mesh Size to “Make It Work.” i.e., What we call “Cheating The Hole”…
If someone told you to sieve your powder at a larger mesh size “just to get it through,” that’s a sign the equipment couldn’t handle your exact material size specification. From the hundreds of customers that we test for other than the short tests this is one of the most common things we hear from companies we run trials for. For example, running a 44 µm powder at 53 µm might look good in a video, but it’s misleading and not representative of the actual performance. That bigger opening means oversized particles slip through, changing your feedstocks’ consistency and potentially causing major downstream issues.
At Elcan Industries, we don’t change your spec to “make the test work”. We don’t just want to make the “test work” we want the test and actual long scale processing to work for your organization for hours, days, weeks and years to come! The Hi-Sifter separates materials exactly at your required cut point, whether that’s 74 µm, 44 µm, 32 µm, or 10 µm. Yes, that’s right, 10 µm, an opening that other screeners and ultrasonics cannot come anywhere close to separating powders at!
4. The Test Ended Before the Problems Started
It’s easy for any machine to look good at the start. The real test is what happens after an hour of continuous running. Does the throughput stay the same? Does the powder start to cake or blind the mesh? Most short trials end before those problems show up.
At Elcan, we run our tests long enough to find out. This SHOULD BE the standard, but unfortunately for all other OEMs, it is not. Their goal is to sell equipment that they can then service and remesh broken screens for indefinitely. Our goal is to prove how a machine performs over time, not just in the first few minutes. We rerun multiple tests under the same conditions to confirm repeatability. If a system only performs once, it isn’t ready for production scale processing. Real testing means seeing consistent results, hour after hour, batch after batch.
5. The People Running the Test Don’t Use the Equipment Themselves
If your test was run by someone or an OEM whom doesn’t use that piece of equipment for longer than a day, it’s not the same as a real-world evaluation. Many equipment manufacturers have demo units set up just for quick marketing tests, not for sustained industrial operation (which is what they are/should be selling this equipment for).
At Elcan Industries, the operators that are running your test are the same operators and engineers who run this very equipment at our ISO 9001-certified toll processing facility every single day. We use the same Hi-Sifters we sell, processing powders for aerospace, battery, and additive manufacturing companies across the world to run your trials!
Remember, if your last trial ended in under a minute, you didn’t get the whole picture; it was just marketing.
For more information on our advanced sieving systems or to trial your powder materials, contact us today!
📞1-800-AT-ELCAN (1-800-283-5226)
