Silo level monitoring: Part 1

Silo high level or overfill: What’s the Worst Thing that Could Happen?
Every year, millions of tonnes of bulk solids like cement, aggregates, animal feed, fly ash, cereals, fertiliser and plastic powders are routinely offloaded by tankers into silos, bins or hoppers in the UK alone. For many companies it is part of the everyday operations. So a reliable form of either or all of these:- silo level measurement, silo overfill protection, bin level indication or hopper level monitoring - is very important, the following blog posts will seek to illustrate why.

What happens if the silo overfills, what are some of the consequences?
Do you have adequate measurement or overfill prevention devices in place on your silo?
What overfill prevention devices are recommended for bulk solids?

So to start . . .

Overfilling a silo: The consequences

At the very least, there will be the costs of lost materials and lost production time. These two things alone could escalate to not meeting a deadline, losing clients and revenue.
The overfill could do actual damage to the silo itself, the bag filters and vents, which means that until this has been fixed, there could be a shortage of capacity to store raw material, processed materials or finished goods.
Silo overpressure can also occur, which will be covered in Part 2.
And, if the above risks weren’t bad enough, a silo overfill can actually cause people injury and even death, from whatever goods are overflowing or objects dislodged and falling from the silo top. This could result in a plant being shutdown. The clean up costs and fines due to polluted air quality from environmental agencies can be levied too.

Any questions, queries or enquiries arising from this blog post, please email us info.uk@vega.com or send us your questions via our contact form.