Jenike & Johanson Solids Flow Essentials: practical design notes for plant engineers
Reviewed by Joe Ashwell
First reported on Australian Mining
30 Second Briefing
Jenike & Johanson has launched a Solids Flow Essentials microlearning series targeted at process and plant engineers dealing with bulk solids handling in hoppers, bins and transfer chutes. The short, modular courses focus on practical issues such as arching, ratholing, segregation and wall friction, using Jenike shear testing concepts and flow property measurements to guide bin and silo design. For operations teams, the material offers a structured way to diagnose chronic flow problems and reduce unplanned downtime without full-length training programmes.
Technical Brief
- Failure modes are treated as design-load cases, encouraging engineers to treat arching and ratholing as predictable, not random.
- Several lessons focus on safe bin entry and isolation, reinforcing lock-out/tag-out around blocked hoppers.
- Case-based examples link poor flow to overloading of feeders and chutes, tying flow design directly to mechanical integrity.
- Training explicitly connects flow property data to allowable wall pressures, supporting safer bin and silo structural design.
- Operations scenarios emphasise early recognition of abnormal discharge patterns as precursors to hang-ups and potential over-pressurisation.
- For industry, the microlearning format supports regular competency refreshers on bulk solids hazards without removing crews from production.
Our Take
Within the 33 Software stories in our coverage, very few are explicitly tagged to Safety, so Jenike & Johanson’s Solids Flow Essentials sits in a relatively small niche of tools aimed at reducing process risk rather than just boosting productivity.
For Australian operators, solids flow training software tends to be adopted first in bulk handling and processing plants where blockage or erratic discharge has already caused downtime or near-miss events, suggesting this microlearning series may be used as a targeted intervention after incident reviews.
In our database, software products linked to safety are more likely to be rolled out across multiple sites once a single operation demonstrates reduced unplanned stoppages, meaning early case studies from Solids Flow Essentials in Australia could strongly influence broader corporate uptake.
Prepared by collating external sources, AI-assisted tools, and Geomechanics.io’s proprietary mining database, then reviewed for technical accuracy & edited by our geotechnical team.
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