IAC Systems Engineer Luis Castano is back again with this month's Baghouse Maintenance Tip-of-the-Month Video about the importance of keeping your industrial baghouse or dust collector system's discharge hopper free of grain load (fallen materials).
Importance of an Empty Baghouse Hopper Video Transcript:
Hello, my name is Luis Castano with an IAC Tip of the Month. This month we want to discuss the importance of having an empty hopper on a dust collector, or baghouse.
Industrial dust collectors and baghouses are meant to handle dirty, dust laden air, filter its flow, then let the cleaned air go out to the fan.
The hopper, which is the lower, slanted section of the baghouse, is not designed to hold material. We need to discharge material that lands in the hopper in order to allow airflow to behave as per the design of the baghouse.
We also want to seal off the hopper area, which is why we need some sort of an airlock discharge device. There are different types of airlock devices, such as a rotary valve or a double dump valve.
I have been into plants where the dust grain loading was so low, they simply had a slide (or knife) gate at the bottom of the hopper, which is acceptable, but we still have to consider that the hopper needs to discharge frequently because as soon as material builds up, we're messing with the air velocities and affecting the performance of the baghouse. Then when we want to discharge, we have to bang the hopper, very likely causing damage, which we see quite often.
We recommend installing the appropriate airlock discharge device for your application, which can be put on a timer so that it discharges every once in a while, even on low grain loading applications. On one occasion we saw a manually operated slide gate being used on a continuous use system. The slide gate wouldn't be activated except once a month, and by then the dust collector’s hopper had a lot of material built up. It was not a good option, and we strongly recommend having an appropriate discharge device so that your baghouse runs efficiently and reliably.
If you would like to discuss this in more detail, please contact IAC, and we can surely help. Thank you!
