Pictured: Special silo feeding Briquette machine direct from filter unit
Chris Franklin, Chairman at Ranheat Engineering Ltd – a leading UK manufacturer of wood combustion equipment – continues his series of articles exclusively for Furniture and Joinery Production.
This month, he writes about the need for specialist silos and feed mechanisms in the woodworking industry, not always associated with a wood combustion system.
For many years, an effective extraction system under COSHH regulations has been a requirement. But what happens to the dust when it has been extracted from the machines and brought to a central point?
Many systems employ a bag or bin-based system where the dust goes into bags often, but not exclusively made of clear polythene.
Nobody wants fine dusts, and nobody wants to handle them. Some extraction systems do work with “dumpy” bags; they are bigger than most and hold more dust.
One use for dusts is to make them into briquettes, but briquettes are, in the main, held together only by pressure. Fine dusts also tend to be very low in moisture content due to the machinery used to produce fine dusts.
As such, these dusts become “Hydroscopic” or in simple terms they absorb the moisture from ambient air. Making high-density briquettes requires high pressures, which, if the dust contains water absorbed from the air, ruins the briquettes.
This means the dusts cannot be stored but must be made into briquettes as soon as possible, ideally directly from the dust extraction system.
This was the problem facing Ranheat and one of their customers. How to transfer material directly from an in-situ, bag-based dust extraction system to an in-situ high-pressure briquette machine with very limited space available.
The other challenge was that if the briquetting machine were to break down, then the extraction system needed to be converted back to a bag system so as not to stall production in the machine shop.
This meant Ranheat had to come up with a design bespoke to a customer’s needs.
The other design consideration was for the feed mechanism to the briquetting machine needed to be of a low power consumption as the dust extraction system and the briquette machine both had high power demands.
Contact Ranheat for further information on all types and sizes of industrial woodburning equipment from 75 kW upwards.
01604 750005
