A blending silo is not just storage. It is a process vessel, and when it stops working properly the symptom shows up somewhere else entirely — as a kiln feed that will not hold chemistry, and an operator chasing it manually shift after shift.
This is the one silo where cleaning is a quality problem, not a capacity problem. Coating and dead zones destroy the flow pattern the silo was designed around. The blending it was specified to deliver simply stops happening, and no amount of tuning downstream recovers it.
| Symptom | What is happening in the silo |
|---|---|
| Kiln feed chemistry swings | Dead zones have destroyed the designed flow pattern — the silo is no longer homogenising, only storing. |
| Aeration pads not fluidising | Coating has buried the pads. Air is going into the wall, not the material. |
| Silo fills sooner than it should | Wall coating has reduced the effective diameter. |
| Discharge erratic, then stops | Ratholing through a compacted annulus of raw meal keyed to the wall. |
| Extraction gates choking repeatedly | Compacted meal at the outlet, usually after a moisture event. |
Raw meal is fine, and fine material packs. Add any moisture — a wet season, a leaking roof, condensation on a cold wall — and it binds. Once bound, the aeration system that was supposed to keep it live becomes the first casualty: the pads coat over, and the silo loses the only tool it had to fluidise itself.
Whipping cleans the wall and recovers the aeration. Working from the top hatch, the whipsets clean coating off the wall and off the aeration pads themselves, so the silo can fluidise properly again rather than being nursed.
Cardox CO2 opens compacted extraction points and breaks any mass that has set below the reach of mechanical whipping.
No moisture introduced. Nothing we use adds water to a material whose whole problem is water.
Send the vessel size, the material and how long it has been a problem. We will come back with an approach, a duration and a price.
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