Clinker inventory
Flyability
A MATERIAL called clinker is commonly used to manufacture many different types of cement. Clinker looks like small grey pebbles. It’s stored in huge silos, and it’s important for cement plants to know how much they have on hand in order to plan for how much cement they can expect to produce.
In the manufacturing process, clinker is ground down to a fine powder and that powder is then used as a binding agent to make cement.
At most cement plants, operators use a manual approach for tracking the inventory of clinker they have on hand. This requires a plant employee to stand on a platform inside a clinker silo and poke into the clinker stored below with a long pole.
Feeling around with the pole, the employee will make an estimation about how much clinker is currently stored in the silo, and report that estimate back to the production team for their planning.
French cement plant
Clinker silos are dusty, dark, and potentially dangerous environments. At a cement plant in France, employees conduct clinker inventories using a pole while standing on a small, shaky platform located 25m (82 feet) in the air at the top of the silo. There are dangers inherent in working at height. It can also produce inaccurate data about the amount of clinker in the silo. Plant operators knew that the approach for taking inventory of clinker was inexact and potentially dangerous, and wanted to see if new technologies could be used to improve the process.
Solution
Creating 3D maps in real time, as the drone flies, using SLAM (simultaneous localisation and mapping), is an ideal tool for operating in a dusty environment like that found inside the clinker silo, where it can be very hard to see.Administrators at the cement plant decided to test the Elios 3 to see if it could be used for the clinker inventory with its lidar sensor allowing it to collect precise data while in flight. Plant operators wanted to see if this data could be processed with GeoSLAM Connect to perform a stockpile measurement of the amount of clinker present in the silo.
Creating 3D maps in real time, as the drone flies, using SLAM (simultaneous localisation and mapping), is an ideal tool for operating in a dusty environment like that found inside the clinker silo, where it can be very hard to see. Even if the drone’s live video feed is obscured by dust, the pilot can fly using the 3D live map to see where the drone is located within the silo, allowing them to fly even when the drone is visually blind.
Results
The stockpile measurement of the clinker was produced quickly and proved to be much more accurate than the inventory that was taken manually. The pilot was able to operate in the dusty environment using the Elios 3’s 3D live map, and the drone remained stable despite the lack of visibility due to its lidar-enabled stabilisation system.
Its overall benefits included its:
- Speed
- Accuracy
- Dusty flying
- Safety
- Coverage.
Additional visual inspection of a filter shaft
In addition to taking inventory of the clinker with the lidar data collected, plant personnel tested the Elios 3 for a filter shaft inspection.
It was suspected that the shaft’s beams might have some damage, and they wanted to see what the beams looked like up close.
Flying into the filter shaft, inspectors were immediately able to see that several of its beams were severely deteriorated.
These findings helped inform the maintenance team’s efforts, and repairs were quickly planned for the shaft so that it could continue functioning and any unplanned shutdowns at the plant could be avoided.
Flyability
This article originally appeared on Flyability.com