Continuous dryer for drying water in the production of catalysts for biogas units
The customer produces catalysts for industrial use, especially for biogas units. One of the steps in this production is also soaking the ceramic inserts of the catalysts in a liquid activation solution. In order to be able to carry out further steps in the production process, the soaked parts need to be dried. Soaked parts can contain up to 30% of the water content and the goal of the process is to reduce this content to below 10%. As part of the expansion of production, the customer needed to significantly increase the drying capacity of these parts using a continuous dryer and also to stabilize the process with this step.
We therefore supplied a continuous dryer SP 6600/15 with a working temperature of 90 °C. The dryer is designed as a single functional unit. A chain conveyor with carrier pallets for passing the batch through the dryer runs through the device. The entrance and exit are equipped with manually sliding stainless steel doors to reduce the clear height of the opening. Heating is provided by three central fan units located on the ceiling of the drying room. Air distribution is provided by a circulating insert. The dryer is divided into 3 heating zones and one cooling zone. The drying zones are equipped with fresh air supply and humid air extraction. In the cooling zone, the parts are cooled by fans and air pressure. At the exit from the drying room, the conveyor drive sprockets are located. All internal parts of the drying room are made of stainless steel.
The drying room can dry various sizes of parts, the largest parts have a diameter of up to 604 mm and a height of up to 400 mm. However, parts that have a significantly smaller diameter or are significantly flatter are also dried (for this reason, the oven entrances and exits are equipped with a manually adjustable door height). Due to the different sizes of the dried parts and the different amounts of bound water, the conveyor speed can be adjusted. The charge is loaded both manually and automatically by a robotic arm. The temperature of the parts at the cooling outlet is below 60 °C.