Wood drying belt conveyors

Based in Porrentruy, Switzerland, our client has a heating plant with an integrated cogeneration installation, which allows the production of renewable electricity and heat. They called on AL industrie to design a complete network of modular conveyors to be installed after their dryer.

Our client has several activities: the creation of heating and electricity that will supply the city of Porrentruy. They also have a second activity which is the sale of drying services.

They use wood chips from the Jura forest to supply their district heating network. No trees are cut down for the sole purpose of producing chips. The material is recovered from the treetops and cut wood not used by the loggers. Private logging companies cut the wood and then dump trucks

Once at the boiler room, the material is dumped into large pits. The grapple installed on an overhead crane is started to move the material between the different pits. Our conveyors are used for the pellet drying activity. The chips are placed in a large hopper that dumps everything into a dryer. The latter dries them to 10% water content before they go into the modular conveyors.

We have developed a network of 4 modular conveyors. The first conveyor is a metal belt lift conveyor, installed at the outlet of the dryer after a screw conveyor. It rises to a height of 6 m and dumps the chips into a small straight belt conveyor. The latter is connected to two other straight scraper conveyors. The small conveyor fills the scraper solutions in turn according to needs. Their function is to fill dump trucks in order to supply the pellet producer.

Each conveyor is fully covered to prevent dust from flying everywhere. It is simply at the exit of the scraper conveyors that the dust is evacuated in the same way as the shavings when they fall into the trucks. We have chosen to connect our solutions by mobile sleeves. Indeed, they prevent the transmission of vibrations from one machine to another and facilitate adjustments.