Sugar extractor silo 4 from Pfeifer & Langen

For over 150 years, natural sugar and specialties from the beet have been newly developed. Pfeifer & Langen stands and lives for sugar. With 2,557 employees and a turnover of around 975 million euros in 2021, you are one of the leading sugar manufacturers in Europe. Well over one million tons of sugar and agricultural products were produced in 2021 – in state-of-the-art, environmentally friendly plants and processes. Sustainable and in harmony with nature.

Silo 4 is a two-chamber concrete silo, consisting of an outer chamber and an inner chamber. Until now, silo 4 (outer chamber) has been discharged via a circular plate conveyor onto which a total of 28 discharge openings can be fed in alternating sequence. The inner chamber is emptied via 17 discharge openings, which alternately feed onto mobile troughed belt conveyors. The sugar is then fed onto two existing bucket elevators via two central troughed belt conveyors and transported into the packaging.

This existing discharge technology, as already successfully implemented by AMF-Bruns in silo 3, was now to be brought up to the current state of the art and automated. The customer has the option of varying the discharge line from the silo between 15 t/h and 100 t/h. Particular emphasis is to be placed on the hygienic and HACCP-compliant design of all system components.

The main objectives here are:

Once AMF-Bruns had received the go-ahead from Pfeifer & Langen to implement this project, the engineering work began. A team of 2 technicians traveled to Jülich to carry out the measurements. With the help of a 3D scanner, several scans were made in the area under silo 4, where the conveyor technology was to be used. Back in Apen, the individual scans were then combined to form a complete scan. This resulted in the 3-dimensional view under silo 4. This meant that the actual engineering could begin. The individual conveyors with the chute/pipe systems and the suspensions/supports had to be placed at the designated positions (silo outlets). This resulted in an overall representation of the conveyor technology under silo 4, taking into account all of the customer’s specifications.

Once the customer had approved this, work began on the design of the individual conveyors.

At the same time as the commitment to implement this project, the individual conveyors were scheduled in the planning/control system for production. This makes it possible to call up the individual items and the progress of the conveyors at any time via the planning and control system (ACDC). This also results in the planning of disassembly and assembly.

Dismantling was already carried out and completed at the end of August / beginning of September 2022. This also included a small part of the assembly, which was specified by the customer. This involved installing the previously delivered plug-in/impact gate valves with the flat gate valves under the individual outlets. This enabled the customer to quickly and fully use the silo again at the start of the campaign.

The main assembly with the installation of the conveyor technology took place from week 44 and was then completed at the end of week 49/50 with the successful commissioning together with the customer.