When a Silo High Level Alarm is not enough…
All your eggs in one basket?
Sometimes in silo level monitoring, it doesn’t just do to have a single silo overfill level alarm or high level switch in place. One such documented case is when a tanker offloaded cement into a silo, which was already full from the day before. This resulted in an explosion during loading and a large heavy filter system blew off the top of the silo and landed on the ground nearby.
Thankfully no one was hurt, but they did have overfill protection devices in place, so what happened and why did the silo overfill?
The silo overfill high-level alarm had been muted when the silo was filled the day before, usually this would reset itself, but as the probe was still covered in cement, it did not reset. The silo also had a safety pressure release valve, but it was caked in cement and unresponsive. We can therefore surmise that likely causes of this silo explosion was a number of preventable events like; allowing the tanker to offload, the muted high level alarm, lack of awareness of overfill and pressure relief devices and no pre-check system in place. As this illustrates it’s no good getting overfill prevention devices, unless you maintain and operate them responsibly.
VEGA offer overfill alarms with self monitoring and fail safe technology, continuous devices to measure how much and anticipate high and low levels being reached, delivering better control of your silo. Ceramic flush pressure transmitters which avoid blockages and can monitor / warn against dangerous overpressure in the silo.
In the next article we will look at some of the devices you can use for overfill.
Did you read the first part of this article? if not you can find it at:
Silo level monitoring Part 3: So What Kind of Overfill Prevention Devices Do You Recommend for Bulk Solids
Silo level monitoring Part 4: Reasons to choose Radar Technology for silo level measurement
Silo level monitoring Part 5: High level overfill prevention switches
Any questions, queries or enquiries arising from this blog post, please mailto:info.uk@vega.com email us or send us your questions via our contact form