Did you solve the problem?

Please comments.

Many thanks ■

From Bulker to Wharehouse inside 250m without a structure! Can you be a more specific? ■

The only way you are going to succesfully do it

is an underground gallery from the wharf to the storage utilising a vacuum unloader system with multiple vacuum lines being fed by a dozer or skid loader on tracks in the ships hold feeding a decelerator cone hopper in turn feeding multiple vacuum lines coming out from under the hopper with regulated flow for each pipe that can be moved back into the storage area.

Unless you are willing to connect and disconnect piping everytime you get a ship in port-with the available piping such as the "Victaulic" system of pipe it is easily done and easily assembled and disasembled. They work very well and I used them for many years at the mine where I used to work and are simple to repair and assemble disasemble as all that is needed is the victaulic gaskets/clamps and a box end spanner/wrench with

out trained labore to assemble/disasemble the pipe. ■

To elaborate on my earlier comment...a bit iffy.

If the vessel really is a bulker then the ash will have to be handled as a bulk comodity.

If you stick a product into a warehouse it should be able to be stacked vertically in racks or on different floor levels. That's what warehouses do.

If you intend satifying the bulk ship & the warehouse then you need a mobile hopper, lightening fast bagging plant, palletiser & a small fork lift fleet. IBC's would do away with the palletiser. All these can be hired.

Caught between demurrages & cargo packing is not unusual when operting in a busy general purpose port.

How permanent would a suitable system have to be?

Can you store somewhere more suitable?

Your brief is quite wrong. Ash should have been consigned in IBC's if your purchasing department had done it's homework. (Do they ever?)

Sad to realise that white elephants are far from extint in South Africa. ■

For warehouse should we read covered flat store?

Fow about grab unload into mobile hopper, belt conveyors to store, underground for the last 50m, elevate by bucket elevator for conveyor distribution in store? ■

Further down the road (pun). You have a situation where a structure 200m long must curtail because of a waterway, roadway or trackwork crossing the tranfer line. Your throughput is 250tph. Is it worth the expense of tunnelling down, under & up again to feed wherever for that sort of throughput?

If you are hell bent on conveying then you could consider cantilevering a shuttle conveyor 26m out over the sacrosant zone & collecting its discharge on a similar device on the far bank.

Either that or tunnelling will both cost you an arm & leg for a handfull of material! Both would also need a mobile hopper because the ship will not move to satisfy a fixed unloading station. So all that a fixed installation would do is to add expense to the operation.

Alongside Designer I ask you to identify the eventual storage building. Can you also illuminate us regarding the 50m no go area? ■

Alternative for the last 50m a couple of mobile belt conveyors that can be parked out of the way then moved into position as required?

PGeorge, perhaps you would like to respond?? ■

Well, on behalf of the other members; thanks for wasting our time. At least we learn that a pipe conveyor is not a fixed structure.

Mind you if a pipe conveyor isn't a fixed structure down there then the mobile conveyors will soon disappear for spares as well. I know: I've been there. ■