Best option for dust collection during silo filling?

[lhall]

Hi all,

We have a grain silo outside our building, in what is fast becoming a high-rise residential area (it was pretty industrial when we bought the building). During the filling of our silo, the dust from the pneumatic blower on the truck billows out of the vent on the silo. We usually hose-clamp a burlap grain bag over the vent, to catch the dust, which works ~ok. But if it gets clogged with dust, the back-pressure in the silo will lift the top pressure-relief vent, blowing dust out and covering the top of the silo with dust.

What I want to ask, is: if you have a similar setup, what are you doing for dust control?

[BDL]

We used to have the vent run into a cut open 55 barrel chemical drum with the end of the pipe covered in about 4-6 inches of water. more than this and it just violently bubbled out all over the place. We found that you need to feed a slight trickle of water to the drum to maintain this as a little does drain out. That was very effective at dust control. We had to drain it after filling the silo or it would ferment in the summer and freeze solid in the winter.

Additionally I have seen a brewery cut a tight hole for the vent to go into an upside down cut open chemical drum, and then they put two small sprayballs inside and when filling would just let the spray balls spray away inside the drum, they said it worked very well for them.

If you absolutely must collect it, look into setting up a manifold with a few of the big bags used in woodworking shops, that they attach to the big dust collector systems.

Good luck!

[TGTimm]

Our silo--and most grain silos I've seen--use a "baghouse", which is a large surface area passive filter (it uses the pneumatic pressure of the grain blower rather than its own blower). The baghouse contains several fabric filter bags, oriented so the action of the iar and dust causes any accumulated dust to fall to the conical collection point at the bottom of the house. These needn't be huge--ours is about 3'X3'X4' tall, for a silo about the size of yours-maybe a bit larger. A local uses the collected dust/grain for hog feed, so it's self-cleaning.

[JLL]

I've used what was described above with great success -- 55 gallon chem drum with a hole cut in the top. Run a flex hose (same OD as your silo vent) from the vent into the drum. Inside the drum, I had copper tubes soldered into a square with several 1/8" holes drilled through it, similar to a homebrewing sparge arm setup. By the end of a 50k lb. fill (about 30-40 minutes maybe) the drum would only be 1/3-1/2 full of water from the internal dust capture so we would unhook everything and dump the bucket. There would be very little dust in the area during the fill using this method.

Hope this helps.