Home → Silo Cleaning Services
Blockages, ratholes and wall build-up cleared with the crew outside the vessel — across cement, steel, power, mining and grain plants in India and abroad.
Cardox India is a silo cleaning company and equipment manufacturer working across 500+ silos, bunkers and hoppers, 55+ plants and 20+ industrial groups over 30+ years, in 6 countries. Every job is done on the principle the industry has been slowest to adopt: No Human Entry.
Most of our work is cement, coal and fly ash — in cement plants, coal-fired thermal power stations, and steel and sponge iron plants, where bunker and hopper cleaning is the recurring problem rather than silos alone.
The vessel changes; the problem rarely does. Material stops moving, the plant works around it, and the loss is absorbed quietly until dispatch or generation is affected.
| Vessel | What we are usually called for |
|---|---|
| Storage silos | Wall coating reducing effective diameter, ratholes, set material, buried aeration pads |
| Coal and fuel bunkers | Bridging above the outlet, hang-ups, compacted fines that will not flow |
| Hoppers and bins | Blocked extraction ports, arching, deadstock that has aged in place |
| Rotary kilns | Ring build-up removed with the refractory lining protected |
| Preheaters and cyclones | Coating and blockages cleared, generally without an outage |
| Ash hoppers and precipitators | Set ash cleared from ESP and boiler ash hoppers |
The cost nobody puts on the board. Capacity falls with the square of the radius, so a modest coating removes far more volume than it appears to. A silo running with a rathole through set material can be holding a fraction of its rating while the level indicator still reads full. Work out what your vessel has lost →
We manufacture and operate both, which is why the recommendation is not fixed in advance.
Both are operated with the crew outside the vessel. Neither requires anyone to be lowered inside.
| The usual approach | What happens |
|---|---|
| Manual poking and ring removal | Puts people under a hanging mass. The reason confined-space entry keeps killing people in this industry. |
| Air blasters and aeration | Effective on flow problems, ineffective once material has genuinely set against the wall. |
| Waiting for the next shutdown | The build-up compounds, and the vessel that was half usable becomes unusable. |
| Water washing | Introduces the one thing most of these materials react to. |
Cement · Coal & pet coke · Fly ash · Clinker · Raw meal & blending · Gypsum · Soda ash · Rock phosphate · Slag · Sinter & DRI · All materials & vessels
If the symptom is clear but the cause is not, the vessel diagnostic narrows it down in three questions. If you know the problem and want the number, the capacity loss calculator gives you the volume you are carrying dead.
Send the vessel type, the material and what you have already tried. We will tell you whether it is a job for the Cardox CO2 System, the Whipping System, or neither — and we will say so if it is neither.