The Mohegan tribe is setting up a facility in my area where they will be producing wood pellets from timber. Its a fairly large and involved operation with grinders and pellet mills.
Has anyone had any experience with these facilities. I have questions
I've done two pellet mills, but it was a long time ago now. The grinders are the hardest part; most of them are Hammer Mills and the rotors are heavy, lot's to accelerate. People tend to get cheap on the control gear and try to put in crappy soft starters that can't handle it and fail, so be wary of that. If anyone tries to sell you a "2 phase" soft starter and says it will work, they are liars or nincompoops. You need a full blown 6 SCR soft starter rated for heavy duty, I'd go for 500% overload capacity for 30 seconds at a minimum as a standard to shoot for, more if possible. If someone can't tell you what their OL capacity is, they are hiding something. This isn't a pump or fan where it won't matter.
They are also often classified areas because of the potential for explosive dust, depending on whether or not they are grinding green wood that's still wet or dried scrap wood I think. Both of the installations I did used these GreCon spark detection systems.
http://www.grecon-us.com/files/pdfs...ing-combustible-dust-fiers-and-explosions.pdf
Love the smell of those places though.
