BM 70 A in the cement industry

- Instrument: BM70A

- Customer: Cementos Portland. Venta de Baños(Palencia) plant.

- Products: Fly ash, cement and flour cement

After our success in the last year in the ceramic sector with the BM700 for sand and dry powder level measurement, we started with the BM70 promotion in the cement sector. We offered a testing unit to the mentioned cement Company, which is the second biggest in Spain.

The testing was successful and we got orders for 7 units to work in 2 different plants to replace Silopilot systems.

After that, a new unit was tested for Clinker level measurement in 12 hopper, 6 metres high, with the following peculiarities:

- Due to the product inlet, which went through a mobile conveyor belt as well as from a mobile octopus crane, it was impossible to install the BM70 in the hopper roof beside it, as there was the risk of stones from the clinker hitting the instrument. These limitations forced us to install the BM70 8 metres above the hopper roof.

- Other added difficulty was that by safety reasons, the size to be made in the hopper roof was limited, those sizes were not to be bigger than 1.2x0.8 m. It wastes a part of the microwave beam before going inside the hopper.

- Other friendly support was that, occasionally, there was the possibility of the octopus crane or the conveyor belt getting a position under the antenna. It was in this situation when the digital input was used to freeze the signal.

We made the start-up by ourselves and after a month of continuous work the instrument performance was more than acceptable to the customer. It has been the only system that was able to measure under the mentioned limitations.

After all the above, the customer was going to place us the order of 11 more units, but just before that, they received an offer from Siemens for their 24 GHz RADAR to the price of 3.900 DEM. After they had explained the situation to Siemens, Siemens officially accepted to send a technician with one unit to be tested.

Two months later, the customer still had not received any new information from Siemens about the testing unit, Cementos Portland decided to place us the order of the remaining 11 units.

Key Words: Level, cement, radar, silo, fly-ash
AP0051