HOSCHTON, GEORGIA - Concetti, a leading manufacturer of bag filling and palletizing machinery, together with Colacem, the third largest Italian cement producer, have developed an innovative solution for filling 3300-4400 lbs bulk bags.
Colacem wanted to export cement in the Mediterranean area and throughout the Caribbean by ship but had to overcome the problem of port terminals that lacked bulk cement storage silos. FIBCs seemed to offer the ideal solution. Concetti designed a weighing and bagging system for bulk bags now installed in Colacem plants in Tunisia and the Dominican Republic, with excellent results and performance.
In each plant Colacem installed two automatic bagging lines for bulk bags with high-precision weighing systems.
Each line is capable of producing 25 x 4400 lbs FIBCs per hour, about 220,000 lbs / hour of cement with both lines in operation. A single operator is able to look after both bagging lines when supported by a forklift operator removing the filled bags, transporting them either to storage or directly onto a truck for transport by land or by sea. A key feature of this bagging line is the exceptional precision of the Concetti gross weighing system, which guarantees high quality, accuracy and high capacity.
The most interesting part was to improve the FIBC’s deaeration technique. In designing the system Concetti had to overcome the well-known problem of air becoming entrained within the product during the filling process. A fine powder like cement does not easily give up air trapped during the filling cycle in the way that a coarse granular material does. However, stabilizing the big bag as soon as possible was central to allowing the full operating speed to be reached and maximizing the production.
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