PACKING TECHNOLOGY

A major change in the cement packing technology must be mentioned, which is spreading in
virtually every country in the world. Rotary and in-line packers have seen, for many years
already, the progressive replacement of traditional, maintenance-intensive mechanical
weighing systems with accurate and reliable micro-processor controlled electronic weighing
systems.

Contrary to the PC market where all products are comparable and differ only in minor detail,
the features of electronic weighing systems available on the market for cement packers at
present, are considerably different depending on their make.

In general, we can say that a good micro-processor weighing system for a cement packer
should offer the following four functions:

1. Provide an efficient weighing correction system, capable of properly reacting to any

changes in tare, bulk density of cement or other physical properties affecting the final weight.
This weighing accuracy is very important for the cement manufacturers, for two reasons, to:
· avoid selling underweight bags and consequent claims from clients and,
· avoid unnecessary overfilling of bags.

2. Provide the highest possible reliability, avoiding dependence of the entire packing
machine from the correct operation of a single weighing instrument. This can be achieved by
making use of the built-in independence that the weighing system of each spout of the packer
offers.

3. Be easily calibrated and programmed through dialogue procedures.

4.

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5. Be connected to the outside, fixed world through a reliable communication interface
and be easily connected to supervisory systems.

Today, cement is being handled through impeller type packers. Air packers have been limited
to other specific applications such as for materials with coarse grain size or containing
abrasive substances. Two different types of impellers are available for handling. In general,
we can say that the horizontal shaft turbine works very well with OPC not exceeding 4000
Blaine, as the impeller provides a mixing effect with air, which improves the product flow.

This effect is totally lacking in a vertical shaft impeller, so this turbine is particularly suitable
for handling highly fluidized materials. Cements having Blaine values exceeding 4000 cm²/g
of specific surface, can easily become highly fluidized during transportation through airslides.

The wear rate of the two systems has recently been compared, and it appears that the vertical
shaft filling impeller has a very low wear rate. However, the horizontal shaft turbine was
never reported to suffer from high wear rates when handling cement. Therefore, the aspect of
wear rate has to be considered as irrelevant when choosing the type of turbine.

We can see that the market tends towards a higher diffusion of high Blaine cement grades.
This justifies, in many cases, the choice of a vertical shaft turbine packer, also when the
cement plant knows that such a type of cement may be introduced in the near future.

It must also be mentioned that there is an increasing tendency towards the reduction of the
bag weight. The EC has issued a recommendation which focuses on this subject. As a result,
Germany, U.K. and Holland have already implemented this change. Today 25 kg bags have
been replaced by 50 kg bags in different countries in central Europe, whereas the rest of
Europe is preparing for the change.

Accordingly, packing and palletising installations have seen and are seeing a development
towards high capacities in terms of bags/hour. In order to maintain the same tonnage, twice as
many bags have to be handled. Capacities of 80 t/h and 100 t/h are normally being considered.

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As far as the palletising of 25 kg bags is concerned, when using the 1000x1200 mm layer
format, there are basically three possibilities:
· 7 bags/layer
· 8 bags/layer
· 10 bags/layer.

In terms of interlocking of layers and stability, the best result is obtained with thin and large
bags, therefore 7 and 8 bags/layer are normally preferred for 25 kg cement bags.

BAG DESPATCH SYSTEMS

As any other branch of the cement industry, bagging and bag despatch technology is
continuously developing. Efforts are at present mainly focusing on the following issues:
6. reduction of equipment and of operating costs
7. increase in capacity per installation
8. improvement of working conditions and cleanliness

Historically, bagging and bag despatch installations used to be - and still are in many
countries - labour intensive areas in the cement plant. Operators were required to feed the
packers with empty bags and to load the bags manually on rail and road trucks.

Today, the technology allows a cement packing and palletising plant to be fully automatically
operated - that is to say without the need of any manual operation for the duration of one
entire 8-hour shift, or even more - and to be controlled by a very limited staff of supervisors.

However, full automation is not applicable everywhere in the same way. Considerations must
be made for cost of labour, procent of unemployment, etc. But of course in every country an
appropriate balance between automation and local conditions can be found.

Apart from labour cost considerations, which vary from country to country, the reasons in
favour of automation in a cement bag packing and despatch installation are essentially the
following:

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· increase in average output per installation
· reduction in dependence from labour and unions
· improvement of working conditions.

The automation of packing plants has been recently completed with the introduction in
industrial operation of automatic bag bundle depalletisers, which feed the automatic bag
applicators directly from the pallet of empty bags. Each pallet can contain up to 5000 empty
bags. It is possible to have a packing plant even of very large size, fully automated for the
duration of one entire shift.

Automation in the subsequent phase, the bag despatch system, also varies greatly depending
on local conditions. Basically, two options are available for the despatch of cement:

9. Direct loading of the cement bags onto the trucks. On open trucks, this can be done
fully automated at a continuous capacity of 130 t/h for 50 kg bags, and supervised by just one
operator, provided the automatic truckloader is suitable for remote control operation.

10. Indirect loading, i.e. producing stacks of bags by means of an automatic palletiser and
storing them in an intermediate warehouse for later retrieval and loading on trucks. Pallets are
usually handled by means of forklift trucks. Today automatic packing/palletising installations
reach unit capacities of 150 t/h in 50 kg. Pallets are commonly handled with 5 ton forklifts,
two at a time, in order to speed up the whole operation without increasing equipment and
manpower.

When using a palletiser it is also possible to protect the stack of bags against
atmospheric agents, by covering it with a plastic film. Different processes exist in this
respect, that we will just mention here shortly:
· stretch-wrapping or stretch hooding using elastic films
· shrink-hooding using thermo-shrinkable film
· pallet-less shrinkwrapping process allowing to form self-supporting totally sealed
packages, usually of 1,45 to 1,95 tons; this system is sometimes used in connection with

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marine or railroad transportation of bagged cement.

There are many situations for which indirect loading of bags (palletising) is the best logistic
approach, for instance, if sales of bags is concentrated in a short period of the day, such as the
early morning or early afternoon, as sometimes happens in countries where cement is mainly
sold in bulk.

The advantage of the indirect loading is, in this case, the possibility to run the packing plant
almost independently from the sales and to prepare the stock of bags using a packing and
palletising installation which has a capacity sized according to the average sales volume,
instead of the peak.

Indirect loading, however, is relatively labour-intensive compared to an automatic truck

loading installation as it involves a staff of at least two people (one at the equipment and one
on a forklift) to handle the same output, instead of one.

Palletising furthermore involves the use of fork-lifts, wooden pallets or, where wood is not
available, plastic film in order to produce palletless packages.

The use of such pallets of plastic packaging can be avoided by using plastic slipsheets and
push-pull forklifts, or castellated pallets. These systems however reduce the capacity of the
installation, since in both cases, forklifts can handle only one pallet at a time, instead of two
pallets as is commonly done with pallets and with palletless plastic packaging. This can be a
critical issue when the installation produces 80 to 100 pallets per hour, as can happen with
modern high-capacity plants.

However, there are many countries where pallets and forklifts do not exist. In this case
indirect loading does not come into consideration, and direct loading is the only method used.

Even in countries where palletising is possible, if the affluence of clients to the cement plant
is sufficiently distributed throughout the day, and the cement plant wants to avoid costs and
organisation problems related to pallet handling, then direct truck loading can be used with

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great advantages.

Today, direct truck loading provides the most automated and thus cost-effective solution for a
cement despatch terminal. Outputs of these types of installations have recently been increased
up to 130 t/h (2600 bags/hour of 50 kg) per each packer and more. Thus providing a good
service to customers with a 30 ton truck being loaded in only 13-14 minutes.

However, the achievable degree of automation and the overall result in terms of average
output in many cases substantially depends on the type of automatic truck loader being used.

The market basically offers two types of automatic truck loaders:

· equipment which operate in close contact with the truck, and work on a mechanical
stacking principle
· equipment which operate without close contact with the truck, and operate by means
of suction heads.

Due to the physical close proximity with the truck, mechanical truck loaders require an
operator standing by continuously for their control. The help of the truck driver itself is often
needed, in order to have precise indications for the positioning of the machine. Hence, remote
control without a local operator standing by each machine is difficult, if not impossible.

Furthermore, in case the truck has rear boards, these have to be opened for loading with
mechanical truck loaders, with a considerable loss of time. In case of trucks with trailers, the
presence of a fixed front board on the trailer represents a further limitation for mechanical
loaders. In all existing installations of this type, the experience has shown that it was
necessary to disconnect the trailer from the truck, thus complicating the loading operation and
correspondingly reducing the average efficiency of the installation.

Suction-disc truckloaders do not have all these limitations and provide an average efficiency
in the range of 90% of the packer output, hence one truck loader is in this case adequate to
handle the production of a rotary packer. Furthermore, suction-disc truckloaders allow the
formation of a compact stack without any empty spaces between pallets, thus maximising

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both the stability of the load and the loaded tonnage per truck.

Average efficiencies of direct loading installations equipped with mechanical truck loaders are
reported to be in some cases down to 50% of the capacity of the packer. The installation of
two mechanical truck loaders per each packer can slightly improve this performance in certain
cases, however with a considerable increase in space requirement and civil costs. In some
cases even with two machines, the situation remains critical, as the experience in various
cement plants in Europe, Middle East and Asia has confirmed.

Another recent development has been the introduction of supervisory systems in the packing
plants. These can be divided in two categories:

· systems monitoring the packing machines and enabling a close control of its
performance in terms of weighing accuracy, production and alarm recording
· general supervisors linked to the control PLCs and looking after the process of the
packing plant.

These systems allow fully automated handling of the flow of trucks from the cement plant
gate to the loading stations, with connection to the administrative computer system for
automatic invoicing.

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