Cement, Energy and Environment

DESIGN OF BUCKET ELEVATOR FOR A CtMENT PLANT- A Software Solution 0 S. Malayappan & H. Kanagasabapathy National Engineering College, K.R. Nagar, Kovilpatti The paper reports an actual study conducted in a large cement plant located in southem Tamil Nadu for replacing the plant's present pneumatic conveyor system, which transports the rawmeal from the rollermill to the storage (blending) silo over 90 meters height. In place of the existing pneumatic conveyor system, a bucket elevator system is designed using Visual Basic as front-end tool. It is estimated that the newsystem would require only 100 kW/hr power as against 500 kW/hr....Ed Introduction Materials handling is an art as well as science of moving, packing and storing of substances in any form. In a cement plant many types of materials handling system (MHS) are used. Though ideally speaking, there sh ould be minimumMHS's in any well-planned industry layout, in practice the share of MHS on total investment in any industry amounts to well beyond 60 per cent. Indeed MHS's play a vital role in almost all engineering industries, in particular, process industries which need to go for a planned, economical MHS's. The various factors which affect the selection of a MHS are : (i) Initial investment, (ii) Maintenance cost, (iii) Power I fuel consumption, and (iv) Versatility and other factors like the material(s) to be handled, its (their) volume, etc. In this background, a study was undertaken on the possibility of replacing the pneumatic conveyor system working in a large cement plant by a bucket elevator system. The MHS in question is used for transporting the raw meal from vertical roller mill to the storage silo through 90 m height. The data of the pneumatic system are as follows : Total length of the conveyor =90m Diameter of the conveyor tube =0.652m Capacity of the conveyor =300tons/hr Specific weight of the particles =1.15 tons/m 3 Lifting height =90m Present power consumption of the system =532.07 kW Design of Bucket Elevator System ACAD program for the bucket elevator system was developed in Visual Basic and the following codes give the software design for the same. Private Sub Command 1 Click() BCAP = (0.24 *CAP) ·. VEL = (0.019 *H) PIT. Text= Format (((2.7 *BCAP *VEL*DEN)/CAP), "# # # #. # #")