The world of commerce is a funny place. You never know what kind of product will catch on, what will fail, or, perhaps most interestingly, what might end up being a huge market that almost no one knows or thinks about. Case in point: ever heard of dense phase pneumatic conveying? Me neither, until today. Experts in the industry, those that knows which way the wind blows, predict that the market will grow to more than $30 billion in just six short years.
Wait, What’s ‘Dense Phase Pneumatic Conveying’?

Though it sounds like it was torn from the pages of science fiction, dense phase pneumatic conveying is actually a pretty common process. Essentially, it involves using small volumes of moving air to send large amounts of bulk material from point A to point B through a series of sealed pneumatic tubes (think of the drive-through at your bank) kept at high pressure. The transferred material, whatever it is, moves fairly slowly, but the system is overall more efficient than higher speed, lower pressure pneumatic conveying (those canisters at the bank move pretty quick) because it uses less energy.

Even if that makes no sense to you, it does to plenty of other folks, it seems. Dense phase pneumatic conveying (which I’ll just call DPPC from now on, for the sake of brevity) is used in a ton of industries, as it can be used to transport everything from cheese powder and corn starch to borax and iron oxide.
Big Business Behind the Scenes

A new report by Grand View Research, Inc., suggests that the worldwide market for DPPC will climb to $30.67 billion by 2022. The report suggests that two factors will play key roles in DPPC’s growth: continuing industrialization around the globe, and the growing demand for energy efficiency. Integration of this technology into just a few huge industries—pharmaceutical processing and food processing are the most likely candidates, according to the report—will be enough to fuel DPPC’s growth at least into the beginning of the next decade.

Just like that, something you’ve likely never heard of is one of the biggest industries on the planet. So keep working on that crazy invention you’ve been tinkering with in the garage for years. It just may be the next dense phase pneumatic conveying. Or something a little easier to say.