Lafarge Cement Group

Location: Lafarge Cement Group – West Thurrock
Product: Primasonics PAS 350 Audiosonic Acoustic Cleaner
Principal: Primasonics® International Ltd (UK)

The large cement terminal located at West Thurrock on the northern outskirts of London, England formally belonged to Castle Cement and are currently owned by the Lafarge Cement Group.  This location also contains twin cement sack packing lines, each equipped with a reverse jet filter system to prevent particulate emissions.  The aim of these packing plants is to work at optimum output over a range of cement products, however because of both cross contamination and hopper pluggage within each filter unit, downtime on each packing line reached unacceptable levels.  In addition, in order to try and minimise cross contamination between brand changes, manual cleaning and hopper unblocking were employed within each of the two filters.  This practice was costly ineffective and dangerous.

The plant engineer contacted Primasonics® International and requested a plant visit.

The solution was really quite simple and highly efficient at low investment cost. The Primasonics engineer recommended the installation of a Primasonics® Acoustic Cleaner model PAS-350, housed within a mounting tube & flange and located at a 30° upwards angle at the top of the sloping filter hopper section. A sounding pattern of a few seconds every few minutes was sufficient to totally eliminate both cross contamination and hopper pluggage, thus facilitating maximum output of both packing lines with rapid
brand change over. In addition it soon became evident that the employment of the Primasonics® Acoustic Cleaners also prevented the filter sleeves from becoming blocked which resulted in low pressure drop with significant increase in filter sleeve life. This in effect meant that as well as facilitating maximum plant utilisation, the Primasonics® Acoustic Cleaners also greatly help reduce filter maintenance time and cost.

Both these two Primasonics® Acoustic Cleaners, Model PAS-350 have now been operating on these filters plants for over five years without requiring any attention or themselves incurring any maintenance costs.