Who are we?

E&G Associates is an engineering consulting and contract research firm with decades of experience in resolving problems faced by a variety of industries, including the pharmaceutical, consumer
products, food and industrial chemical sectors.
With our extensive powder characterization expertise, we offer our clients an industry-unique comprehensive approach to problems aimed at manipulating both powder properties and process design to resolve processing and product development challenges.

Should you be concerned?

The international economic impact of particulate materials has been estimated at one trillion US dollars, based on value added by manufacturing. In addition, processes requiring the handling of particles are estimated to rarely reach more than 60% of design capacity and require 10 times longer to start-up than those involving only liquid-gas streams.
While having many unique technical properties and marketing features, particulate products can be wrought with many quality concerns such as caking, flowability, attrition, or settling. Furthermore, there is little formal training of scientists and engineers in particle technology in the US when compared to Germany and Japan.
This state of affairs is attributed to a lack of appreciation of the peculiar nature of particles. Given that particulate phases are common to nearly every industry, the chances are that particle technology directly impacts your manufacturing and research endeavors, and, in particular, your company’s competitiveness.

Our approach

The approach of E&G Associates is to tailor particulate systems to a given beneficial end-use, a need traced back to the earliest of civilizations. However, many industries continue to suffer significant economic losses due to a lack of appreciation of the complexities of particulate behavior. Powder characterization in not a new realm of study, yet many of its principles have been slow to seep into industrial processing. (See e.g. “Particle Technology – The Legacy of Neglect in the US”, Chemical Engineering Progress, 1994. Ennis et al.)
One must endeavor to unravel the governing particle interactions for the problem at hand if any lasting progress is to be made. We emphasize a holistic, systems approach to solving problems, since particle interactions and the involved unit-operations are often highly coupled. This approach is stressed both in our consulting practice, as well as continuing education training. It is through this understanding of particle interactions that many problems can be overcome and both processes and products properly designed.
It is important that sound engineering principles drawing on powder technology understanding not be neglected in the development of solutions. Within the reference of powder research and particle characterization, Professor Roland Clift, O.B.E. (Univ. of Surrey, UK) in a plenary lecture to the Particle Technology Forum of AIChE coined the phrase – “powder rituals.” Essentially, he wished to emphasize that rather than rely on rituals in powder testing which measure more the interaction between test equipment and the powder, we should instead attempt as best we can to measure properties of the powder itself — what we would define as material variables.