Buhler Grain Logistics - Residue free conveying systems guarantee best sani
Minmetal / North Star Shipping - A cargo handling terminal on the Black Sea.
One of the latest projects is the new cargo handling terminal for North Star Shipping at the port of Constanta on the Black Sea. The plant is primarily a place of transshipment and an intermediate storage facility. The grain is collected throughout Romania at grain collection facilities along the Danube route and then loaded onto deep-sea vessels (Panamax ships) from river craft, trains and trucks at the port of Constanta. A total of 240,000 tons can be stored in the 32 round steel silos at the cargo handling terminal.
For better hygiene and improved quality, all the elevators have residue-free conveying systems. In this special design “made by Schmidt-Seeger”, the construction was modified to minimize gaps and eliminate all dead angles and spaces. The result is 99.9% residue-free conveying of the product. This has the major benefit that no residue is left in the conveyor, which in turn means a higher standard of hygiene. As for the trough chain conveyors, the customer also had special requirements in relation to protection against wear. The entire conveying system had to be rugged and offer an extended service life even if used for large transport volumes. As a consequence, not only was the base of the trough chain conveyor lined with Rino Hyde plastic but the bottom part of the trough as well. Other requirements to be met by the conveying system included ensuring that the technical preconditions for preventing the ignition of a hazardous, explosive atmosphere were achieved and constructive measures for restricting the impact of an explosion to an acceptable level taken.
To meet the requirements of European explosion protection standards, the plans included gutter dedusting devices for every receiving area. And in the ship receiving areas, too, a filter plant was planned in order to ensure optimum dust control and therefore a high standard of safety.
Dust is removed from the complete system by four filter plants, three of which have a capacity of 215 m3/min, the other 520 m3/min. In addition, the plans included spot filters on all the elevators for direct dedusting. The aspiration system meets the requirements of the latest statutory regulations such as the Atex directive and the German “TA-Luft” directive on clean air.
