Slag Hopper & Silo Cleaning

Slag is unusual among the materials we handle because it turns up at both ends of the supply chain — as a by-product in the steel plant, and as a raw material in the cement plant. It fails differently in each.

Two materials, one name

Where it sits	How it fails
Air-cooled slag — pits and hoppers under the blast furnace and steel melt shop	Arrives hot and fuses as it cools. What forms is not a cake but a solid mass bonded to the vessel — vibrators do nothing to it.
Granulated slag (GBFS) — silos at cement grinding units and slag cement plants	Arrives wet from granulation. Moisture plus fines means caking against the wall, ratholing and buried aeration.

Where we work

• Slag hoppers and pits beneath blast furnaces and steel melt shops
• Granulated slag silos at cement grinding units and slag cement plants
• Slag day bins and feed hoppers ahead of the grinding circuit
• Reclaim hoppers, transfer chutes and conveying line blockages
• Slag dryer feed bins, where wet material bridges before it ever reaches the dryer

How we clear it

Fused slag in a hopper or pit is a Cardox job. It has set beyond anything mechanical will move, and it is usually localised at the cone and outlet — which suits a tube fired through a wall socket. The blockage breaks in milliseconds, and it works at temperature, so nothing has to cool down first.

Caked granulated slag in a silo is a whipping job first. The boom enters through the top hatch and the whipsets clean the caked layer off the wall and recover any buried aeration pads, with Cardox opening the extraction point where material has compacted under head.

Slag is abrasive. Silo liners in slag service are usually already worn, so the whipset is matched to the condition of the vessel rather than to the hardness of the material alone.

Related: sinter and DRI hoppers, steel plant cleaning, and cement plants where slag arrives as feed.