ARABIAN BULK TERMINAL COMPANY LIMITED – SUDAN
Introduction :
STAR Cement’s has a bulk cement terminal located at Osman Digna Harbour at the Red Sea, Port Sawakin, 45 km from Port Sudan, Islamic Republic of Sudan and receives cement from different sources. The plant packages Ordinary Portland Cement ASTM C150: 95, Type I as well as complying to EN 197 grade of 52.5 and 42.5
Cement Transfer Process :
Cement is received at the plant by sea route through ships. Commercial jetty at Osman Digna Harbour is used for berthing of the ‘bulk cement ships’. The cement is then unloaded from the ships with the help of a high efficiency pneumatic mobile ship-unloader of Van Aalst, Holland.
Unloading rate of the ship unloader is approx 175 - 200 tph. The cement is then pneumatically transported to two cement silos.
Each silo is capable of holding 10,000 tons and filled one at a time. The cement is extracted from the storage silos with the help of aeration air slides. Each silo has 10 discharge openings. At each discharge openings, manual, pneumatic and flow control gates are provided.
Each storage silo has about 40 open air slides for silo aeration Roots blowers have also been installed for silo aeration during filling as well as discharge. Cyclic aeration is done to achieve uniform and controlled discharge from the storage silos.
Silos discharge air slides transfer the cement to a collecting belt conveyor under the silo. This collecting belt conveyor transports the material to a cross belt conveyor which in turn discharges the cement to a “Packer Feed Bucket elevator”.
The “Packer Feed Bucket elevator” transports the cement to a packing plant Building. This bucket elevator feeds the material to screen bin and packer in Sequence. The packer is of state of the art Electronic high accuracy Roto Packer of German origin. The packed bags are loaded to the trucks with the help of two truck Loaders.
High quality 3-4 ply Scandinavian quality, 50 kg paper bags are used for packing the cement. The plant has a capacity of 500 000 tons per year which is extendable.
Facilities Available :
Auxiliary equipment such as blowers, compressors, hoists, bag filters and chute work are also present. High pressure compressed air system based on a single central compressor and utility pipeline is used to carry the compressed air to various consumption points No water treatment is required for the process.
However for cooling water requirement and also to meet the requirements for portable water adequately sized water treatment plant with distribution piping has been installed .
Plant general services include a functional workshop and fire-fighting system. Adequately equipped laboratory with testing facilities to meet local statutory requirements is also provided. Operators from Control Room control the plant operation in automatic mode. PLC based central control system has also been installed.
The process departments control from the control room in a hierarchical order:
- Departmental control through microprocessor based programmable controllers for real time acquisition of process parameters and plant safety and fail safe operation.
- Human Machine Interface through operator stations connected to programmable controllers through communication bus.
The entire process from cement transport packing and despatch is controlled from the control desk. At the field level, there are digital analogue Input/ Output module racks and processors. These processors have self diagnostic features to ensure healthy working at all times and to give advance warning through audio visual means for any fault in the same.
At HMI level there are supervisory computers for monitoring and control of process parameters. The computers for supervisory control have adequate memory for colour graphics, system software and software.
The terminal also consists of a Packing Plant, Truck Loading and Empty Bag Godown, Laboratory Building and a Workshop Building.
The facility has been successfully commissioned during November 2005.
Address for Communication :
Arabian Bulk Cement Terminal Ltd,
Post Box: 3571
Imtidad, Khartoum, Sudan
Tel:+ 249 479377 479378
Fax:+ 249 479380