Page 7 - Issue 27

Cover 7

The tour

Cement Offloading Bagging

The raw material for PPC Botswana is sourced from RSA and Final Product is withdrawn from the Final storage silo
transported to PPC Botswana in rail tankers or wagons. This through bucket elevators and air slides and fed into the bag-
comes in the form of CEM II B/L (implying it’s been extended ging machines. From there, bagging machine are manually
with limestone) at a surface area between 3,800cm2/g to fed with paper and the bagging machine would fill each bag
3,900cm2/g. The rail wagons in the picture are positioned to at a rate of 1600 Bags per hour.
pneumatically conveyed into the adjacent raw silo.

Pallet Cover Application Storage Silos
From the palletizer, the unitized and palletized (UP) product The raw cement or raw material is pneumatically conveyed
checks into the stretch hood applicator. This is the point at into the raw silo. From the raw silo, the raw cement con-
which the ‘UP” product is covered with an 85micron plastic veyed through the cement weigh feeders, simultaneously,
hood transforming it into a UPC (Covered) product. This is to unclassified fly-ash is also conveyed through the ash weigh
make the complete product weather proof. feeder such that raw cement and fly ash combine in a bin
beneath the two weigh feeders.
CSR : How To Us Investments The new mixture is then conveyed to the separator, where-
How To Us Investments, based in Molepolole, is a CSI (Corporate upon through cyclonic separation, the final product is
Social Responsibility) project funded by PPC Botswana in an effort discharged to the final silo and the coarse product is rejected
to empower and equip Batswana women with entrepreneurial to a ball mill for further grinding to a Blaine of ±4200 cm2/g.
skills. The sewing company creates products like laptop bags, The separator is meant optimize production by classifying
shopper bags, pencil cases and benches out of recycled PPC the product such that what is fed into the ball mill is exactly
cement bags. PPC Botswana has provided the ladies with the what needs to be size reduced.
skills to make these various products, which is in line with the
company’s mission of empowering people to experience a better
quality of life.

www.engineerbw.com Issue 27 - May /June 2020