Seamlessly Moving Your Wet And Dry Bulk Material
Many sites deal with corrosive slurries and abrasive dry solids, so understanding their shared challenges and differing handling requirements is essential to many plant managers.
Since Atlantic Pumps’ strategic addition of Peveril Machinery, the specialists in dry bulk powder systems, customers have benefitted from our joined-up approach to wet and dry bulk material handling.
Merging Peveril’s dry bulk material handling expertise into Atlantic Pumps enables a seamless process whether you’re moving sludge, pastes, semi-solid matter, or dry bulk material.
The move has further strengthened our engineering teams by embedding the technical know-how and fabrication capabilities for both wet and dry bulk material equipment, making Atlantic Pumps a partner of choice for companies processing abrasive products.
Projects that have already benefitted from this combined experience include a critical minerals beneficiation pilot plant, fine powder storage and dispensing in a production environment, RMX (ready mixed concrete) plants, and clinker block manufacturers.
Optimising systems for lower lifetime/TOTEX costs, energy efficiency, and downtime minimisation is central to Atlantic Pumps' philosophy and is reflected in the Peveril product range. The range includes silo storage vessels, vibration motors, conveying systems, mixers, screw pumps, bagging and debagging units, transfer point enablement, and system load balancing. All these solutions are compatible with Senteos, the cloud-based performance and control platform, another Atlantic Pumps innovation.
Peveril’s strength is its focus on wear-resistant, bespoke systems for manufacturers of specialist grouts, high-performance cement products, value-added blenders, and ‘final mile’ dry aggregate packing and distribution. Handling and storage components are often designed and built to customised requirements, helping clients overcome problems of space constraints, product diversity, productivity, and quality control.
Both wet and dry bulk material handling systems benefit from the same principles of system-wide optimisation, data visibility, extending equipment lifetime, and MTBF (mean time between failure).
The Importance of Material Transfer Points
Every transfer point of the production and distribution line is a potential area for disruption - or to put it positively - holds potential for improved efficiency and profitability. Examples are silo to bagging points which are poorly designed, or no longer suit the current operational requirements. Blockages, leakages, residue, contamination, and corrosion affect the plant’s capacity, labour time and H&S management. Worn mixers and augers absorb more power for less output, and a lack of well-laid-out infrastructure creates production bottlenecks.
Analysing constraint points and production facilities in light of current and forecast product demand can reveal big savings and growth enablers. Typically, product demands change over time leading to a mismatch between the original equipment parameters and optimal efficiency for the current throughput.
In the case of a specialist aggregate supplier, we were contracted to design and build a bagging line to produce 27 different products using 3 storage silos. This entailed designing silo and hoppers that can handle the various particle sizes, and fully empty between batches. Additionally, each bagging hopper can divert to fill either 25kg backs or ‘1 tonne’ big bags. Read the full case study here.
Data, AI and Automation – Improving Efficiency, Profitability and Safety
Atlantic Pumps has invested heavily in Senteos®, the secure and robust cloud-based data recorder and remote plant control system for heavy industry and remote sites such as quarries, mines, and factories. Senteos® logs critical data for compliance, management and auditing purposes, in addition to activating equipment remotely. The CM02 control module is a second-generation model that enables easier management of multiple sites and large asset fleets. This patent-pending CM02 has a reduced power draw, more input and output connections, and multiple units that can be linked to a single Senteos account.
The online portal brings together data from diverse sensors, giving management real-time visualisation of performance, issuing alerts by SMS text or email when intervention is required, and can be programmed to turn certain equipment on or off if pre-set ‘hard’ limits are reached.
Data parameters captured by Senteos® can be scale-based such as temperature, duration, pressure, weight etc, or binary such as on/off, and open/closed status. Returning commands can be user-controlled manually, and set to automatically shut down or start up specific equipment when pre-programmed conditions are met.
In addition to our own innovations, Atlantic Pumps has a close working relationship with other manufacturers of specialist equipment. This is to ensure our system designers and engineers can develop the best solution for your wet and dry bulk material handling needs without being tied to one stable. Please speak to one of our specialist solution providers to see how we can ease pressure on your site management while strengthening your quality control, compliance, health and safety, profitability, and sustainability.
