Canadian Fertilizers

For many years we had been manually dipping the level in our lime silo and recognized over the years that the lime “rat holed” in the silo, making accurate determination of the level tricky at best. Another problem we had was the inability to measure the lime silo level when offloading lime truck into the silo. This process would occasionally result in overfilling the silo. The decision was made to install a radar level transmitter but we recognized that we would still have difficulty measuring the level due to the slope of the “rat hole”. I had read about the sonic horn in a trade magazine and made some inquiries as to how they would work in lime service. It seemed like a good fit.

We installed the Sonic Horn and Radar level transmitter at the same time and commissioned them together. The sonic horn is set to blast for 10 seconds every 60 minutes in routine operation and 10 seconds every 5 minutes over a 6 hour period when the “truck fill” button is pushed (see photo).

Since installation the system has worked great, giving us reliable and accurate silo level and allowing predictable tracking of the level for reordering lime and reliable indication of the silo level during lime truck offloading. When we have done manual dipping of the level to verify the radar transmitter, it can be noticed that the “rat holing” is absent or much less pronounced. We are very happy overall with the performance of the sonic horn.

Vincent Crowley | CF Industries
Chief Power Engineer