Custom made fluidization cone
Our customer provides food, agricultural, financial and industrial products and services around the world. Cargill supplies industrial users of energy, salt, starch and steel products. Cargill develops and markets sustainable products, made from agricultural renewable raw materials. Veenstra was approached for developing a fluidization bottom for an existing silo in which a powder is already stored. The Veenstra engineers subsequently designed a silo bottom in which fluidization takes place over the entire cone. This cone ensures that no product is left behind (bridges) when the product in unloaded out of the silo.
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Because the customer also wants the silo to be suitable for other products, provisions for future fittings have been added to the silo cone. Mounting positions have been added for any type of vibrators, for example. When the silo would for instance be used for a product that is difficult to fluidize, the vibration motors can ensure that bridging is prevented and the product can still be unloaded “smoothly”. This prevents the silo floor from being damaged by abuse with hammers. This is a situation which appears quite often in practice, when smoothly unloading is not possible following from the product bridging in the silo.
Fluidization cloth
Because the concerned product is a fine powder which also could ‘bridge’ quite quickly, the entire cone is fitted with a Foodgrade fluidization cloth that is permeable to air. In order to keep the seamless fluidization fabric in place and to aerate it correctly, the fabric is secured with polished stainless steel mounting strips. Due to the design and the smooth surface of the mounting frames, little product will be left behind whilst applying the fluidization system. Also from the way the fluidization fabric is mounted into the cone, the system can function under a minimal of air pressure. Due to the minimal air pressure the fabric will not bulge.
Rising demand for fluidization.
Because more and more bulk transport takes place by road and because the loading time has to be shortened further and further, the loading speed has increased more and more in the recent years. Due to the required increased loading speed, significantly more dust is created during loading. Therefore a proper dust-free loading system or charging station is becoming increasingly important. In addition to the use of loading spouts with a proper vacuum extraction and filter system, it might even be more important to prevent dust formation in the first place. A combination of the systems mentioned above ensures that a bulk truck is loaded very quickly and dust-free. For this reason, we are increasingly involved in the design of new silos and also in the conversion of existing silo- and bulk loading systems to Veenstra installations.
