Your situation would be better handled with a short 24 inch belt conveyor due to the residual sugar content in the bagasse and the moisture content of the air in the sugar factory.

The other overwhelming factor the the inconsistancy of the material size.

My other questions are these, Are you using a mill or a diffuser for sucrose recovery?, what is the material temperature at the point of transfer?, what is the residual sugar content?

With a small width belt conveyor you will not have to worry about waste build up plugging and it will take less power to operate and space in the factory-assuming you are generating your own power for plant wide use-even more important if you are buying power for the sugar factory.

I am assuming the distance you are discussing is in a straight line so a small 24 inch conveyor would be even more cost effective.

The other even simpler and even more cost effective option is a bucket elevator with plastic buckets and corrosion resistant chain. A bucket elevator can easily handle the 10 tons per hour of spent baggase.

This is even easier and less expensive with fewer moving parts as you are using gravity to deliver the spent baggase in a larger gravity fed drop pipe to the storage bunker or bin.

It will use less energy as well just be sure to have adequate height to allow for free flow of the baggase to storage as you are using gravity to your advantage with a bucket elevator.

The higher the elevator the steeper the drop to storage and less plugging meaning if the drop is almost vertical 70-85 degrees you will have less chances of plugging-if you can put the elevator next to the storage storage it will be even easier with an almost vertical drop.

With a bucket elevator cleaning the pipe is easy as you are able to use stove pipe cleaning brushes and hot water to clean the drop pipe if it is clogging or clogged with waste baggase.

An even easier method is a pipeline pig to push all the material through the pipe by using compressed air to push the pig through the pipe.

Using your ten tons per hour figure you will be moving:

One ton of baggase every six minutes or 333.3334

pounds per minute of spent baggase which the bucket elevator can easily handle with little work and less worry about sugar waste syrup clogging the pipe from residual drip as the bucket elevator is chain driven with sprockets you will not have to worry about slippage. ■

A belt & bucket solution is your only practical solution: as already mentioned. Bagasse is as unique as the name. I recall the particle boards of the Natal 1980's bursting back into life and producing unexpected indoor plants as a bonus. Has anything changed since then? ■

Hello John,

your story reminds me of the mine where I once worked-the ore skip/hoisting shaft used white oak guide timbers that were 4 inch by 8 inch guides to align the ore skips in the shaft proper and they had a habit of growing limbs even though they were washed with a very dilute salt water run off coming from cracks in the rock surrounding the rectangular ore skip mine shaft.

leonZ ■

bagasse is tricky ,

the now extinct FIBRASIN handled bagasse precicely to fabricate boards.

The bagasse started in a sugar INGENIO , next dor. they dumped the stuff in our patio, where it was rained over etc.

first we had to wash the bagasse , for that there was a couple of tanks , similar to clarifiers where the bagasse was supposed to submerge and sepparate , to remove stones , metals and dirt and some of the remaining sugar licors.

then ther was another conveyou to a strainer screw feeder, where most of the water was removed then another conveyor, then a chain drag conveyor for further washing and drying.

then it was fed into a bin witth a feeder that dumped it in a rotating disk (blade ) that broque the fibers apart, from there it could be conveyed pneumatically .

It was then fed into a puddler where it was spread in a pond , lets call it a ocilating pond , where it arranged itself into what can be called a floating layer.

this layer was then fed into a porous belt with suction drums . to dry the layer , then into compresion trains just like the ones used in paper, an so on.

the real problem was to uniformly feed the bagasse into the first conveyor , so that the stuff woudnt float in the washing ponds.

once that was achieved the rest worked fine .

At what stage do you want to pneumatically convey, at the beguininh or after the washing drying and sepparating the individual fibers .

Anything can be conveyed , pneumatically , it is just a question of Money , (power) .

I concurr with our colleagues you might be better off with a belt , but if you want it badly we can help.

marco ■