A Better Approach To Bulk Food Unloading

Bulk delivery of basic food ingredients — such as sugar, flour, soy, and food powders — presents inherent issues at the point of unloading. For many years, the pneumatic conveying of the material from the truck into the silos has been accomplished with blowers connected to the truck.

The downside is that the truck’s diesel motor is running during the entire unloading process, which could take as much as 90 minutes. A large truck in idle mode, for example, can generate more than 14,000 grams of CO2 during this span. As countries and regulators across the globe seek to curb carbon emissions, while industries work toward sustainability goals, this approach is quickly becoming unacceptable.

An emerging solution is to replace the truck-mounted blowers with positive displacement blowers that are located at the loading point of the plant. Not only does the electricity used to power these stationary blowers generate significantly lower CO2 than the legacy equipment, installing the right blower can safely accelerate the unloading process.