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Feeding reactor powders can be a real challenge. There are many questions that arise from this. Gericke answered these questions by designing and delivering an ergonomic reactor feed system using pneumatic suction and pressure conveying systems. How to load a reactor with precise quantities of different types of powders, some even having very poor flow characteristics, without creating dust clouds, in complete safety for the operators, and while limiting material handling operations as much as possible firsts by operating staff? Faced with all these questions, Gericke found the answers by combining pneumatic suction and pressure transport systems. One of the world leaders in the chemical industry has entrusted Gericke with the study and construction of an installation allowing the introduction of different types of powders packaged in bags into large reactors of more than 100 m3. The most traditional filling method would have consisted of unloading the bags directly into the reactor through an inlet positioned more than 12 m from the ground, causing safety and ergonomic problems for operators forced to handle the bags from the ground floor. - floor. Gericke's solution was to install a bag unloading station at zero level, fitted with a very large door allowing the unloading of 20 kg bags of extremely light and volatile filter aids. The hopper of the bag-unloader, equipped with a screw at the bottom of the trough, feeds a pneumatic transport which lifts the product in a weighed hopper. This configuration makes it easy to empty all powders, including those with very poor flow. The receiving hopper, mounted on load cells, controls the recipe that will be fed into the reactor. The load made up of different ingredients is between 60 and 500 kg. The initially vacuum receiving hopper is pressurized. The feed is thus shipped to the reactor via dense phase pneumatic transport. For reasons of an explosive atmosphere inside the reactor, the pneumatic transport is carried out under nitrogen. The so-called "dense phase" mode has been favored to limit nitrogen consumption to a minimum. The bag emptying zone was located more than 30 m from the reactor in an isolated non-ATEX zone. With the pneumatic transport in the dense phase, this zone could very well have been positioned at more than 150 m. Given the technical challenges, during the project Gericke tested and validated the operation of its dense phase vacuum transport systems on all customer products.