Have you ever been driving along the highway or near an industrial area and wondered what the large concrete domes are used for? Or why would you bother building a dome like that? As simple as they look, there is a lot of technology at work in these structures.
These domes are usually used to store cement, fertilizer, or other bulk material. The whole facility, including incline conveyor and reclaim systems, is designed to move and store these materials as inexpensively as possible. Some domes can hold in excess of 100 million tons of material. When you’re dealing with that much stuff, you need to find the most efficient ways to handle it you can.
Domes are used because they are space efficient, they’re inherently strong, and they are easy to load and unload. These facilities also need to make sure the content stays absolutely dry. You can imagine what would happen if a full dome of cement powder got wet. You could end up with one solid dome-shaped lump of concrete – not very useful.
To fill the dome, cement is shipped to the storage facility on a train, ship, or truck. Operators use a transloader, a specialized conveyor system, to move the powder from the transport to the storage facility. From there, a covered incline conveyor system carries the fill up to an opening in the top of the dome, where it falls uniformly into the hollow dome.
Why bother carrying the material up just to drop it in? Because it’s cheaper and easier to do this than push it around from the side or bottom. Remember we’re working with millions of tons at a time.
Removing or “reclaiming” the cement from the dome is a little more complicated. Material is drained from a hole in the floor of the dome and is carried outside the building on another conveyor belt. At first, gravity does most of the work. But as cement powder syphons out of the dome, it tends to empty the middle first, leaving material piled around the edges of the dome. It would take considerable effort to remove the last of the product manually. So most dome units have automated reclaim systems with large arms that comb the entire area, leveling the fill and allowing gravity to pull it down.
