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Common to all processors is the concept of a recipe. Wherever two or more materials are combined, a recipe exists. Whether it's called a recipe, a formulation, blend, or compound, the notion is the same: to specify ingredient proportions to create a product possessing certain carefully defined properties, attributes or characteristics. Small-scale processing operations may proportion ingredients manually (either by volume or weight), but continuous or batch feeders usually perform the proportioning operation where throughputs are higher.

While many factors contribute to end-product consistency, the ingredient proportioning system ranks especially high in importance. Proportioning is the point where ingredients merge, and no matter how thoroughly the blend stream is then mixed, melted, conveyed or otherwise processed, the proportioning point remains the best opportunity to achieve end-product uniformity.

However, a search of available literature shows remarkably little attention has been paid to this important aspect of the processing operation. This article addresses the subject by offering a practical expression of composite blend uniformity processors can adopt to assess the performance of their feeding/proportioning systems.