How much storage is your build-up costing?

Why a thin coating costs so much

The instinct is to treat build-up as a percentage of the diameter. A 10 m silo with 100 mm on the wall has lost 2 % of its diameter, so it feels like a 2 % problem. It is not. Storage volume follows the square of the radius, so that same coating removes very nearly 4 % of the silo — and on a 5 m vessel, closer to 8 %.

Put in plant terms: on a 10 m diameter silo with a 20 m straight section, 100 mm of coating is about 62 m³ gone, and roughly 87 tonnes of cement sitting on the wall instead of moving through the plant. Let that coating reach 250 mm and it becomes 153 m³ and some 214 tonnes — because the loss climbs faster than the coating does. That is stock you have paid to produce, cannot sell, and are housing indefinitely.

Capacity is usually the least of it

By the time a coating is thick enough to show up in stock reconciliation, it has normally already caused problems that cost more than the lost volume:

• Erratic discharge. A narrowed, roughened bore promotes ratholing and bridging, so flow becomes unpredictable long before capacity becomes the complaint.
• Material quality. Coating means first-in material never leaves. On cement and raw meal that eventually shows up as an off-spec batch.
• Structural loading. Hundreds of tonnes keyed to one side of a shell is an eccentric load the silo was not designed to carry.
• The collapse risk. A slab of hardened material can release as a single mass. This is the reason no one should be inside the vessel — see why we clean without human entry.

How the build-up is removed

Both of our methods work from outside the vessel, with nobody inside it at any point.

• The Whipping System — a rotating head lowered through a roof hatch, driven by a hydraulic power pack, that takes coating off the wall progressively. This is the usual answer to an even coating of the kind this calculator models.
• The Cardox CO₂ System — a reusable steel tube that discharges liquid carbon dioxide as a rapid, cold, non-incendive pressure pulse. No flame, no spark. This is what shifts a hardened mass, a bridge or a plugged cone that whipping alone will not touch.

Which one applies depends on the vessel and the material. If you are not sure, the vessel diagnostic will narrow it down in three questions, or send us the numbers and we will tell you.