Improving the chute design for Eurosilo system

Abstract

The transfer chute design for Eurosilo system handling coal was found to fail due to wear. The current transfer chute was designed based on rockbox concept. There are no specific methodologies for design of chutes for a rock box concept involving a very high velocity transfer. New or improved designs were required to sustain in the industry. The designs were done based on the basic guidelines and application specific constraints and Discrete Element Method, which is becoming widely popular for modelling and simulating bulk solid flow is used to analyze the performance of the chute against wear. Three different improved designs were created and inbuilt models in EDEM were used to analyze for wear performance using Hertz-Mindlin with Archard wear model, while Hertz Mindlin with JKR is used for flow performance. Based on the results of the simulation, two chute designs proved to perform better against wear and worst flow conditions. DEM proved to be a very efficient tool in analyzing the chute design in a predictive way. However for better results on specific case scenarios, simulations with calibrated models based on experiments is highly recommended.