Powder Processing's Major Challenge: Quality Assurance And Quality Control Need Quality Test Methods

By Vinnie Hebert, Brookfield Engineering Laboratories

Consider the definitions for quality assurance and quality control:

Quality Assurance: The maintenance of a desired level of quality in a service or product, especially by means of attention to every stage of the process of delivery or production.

Quality Control: A system of maintaining standards in manufactured products by testing a sample of the output against the specification.

The common word here is “quality”. Certainly, any company will acknowledge the importance of QA/QC testing on their products as they are being produced. In the bulk solids industry, however, while QA/QC testing is performed during the production cycle, the test methods that supposedly ensure a smooth run are sometimes circumspect and lacking in true “quality”.