Bucket Elevator for Charcoal Briquetting Process

General Description

Royal Oak Enterprises is a family-owned business started in 1953. With a commitment to providing the highest quality products, it has become the largest producer of natural lump charcoal in the United States. Royal Oak also offers a full range of grilling products including charcoal briquettes, hardwood lumps, and fire starters. Now operating sixteen plants across the US, Royal Oak is committed to making quality products for everyone from the at-home pros to the competitive pitmaster.

Royal Oak contacted KWS via our online website tool to aid in the design and supply of a new bucket elevator as a much-needed replacement for an existing aging elevator built in the early 1970s. The new bucket elevator would lift a dried charcoal briquette mixture from a screw conveyor at ground level to a batch mixer on a mezzanine a little over 20 feet above the ground. To make briquettes, the dry ingredients are mixed into a thick paste and fed into rolling molds that compress the mixture to form little bricks and give them their distinctive shape. Typical ingredients include sawdust or wood chips, coal, peat, borax, limestone, sodium nitrate, and starch. The batch mixer receives these raw bulk materials from various sources before discharging the mixture onto a belt conveyor where it is conveyed to the briquetter.

Design Parameters

1. Product Type: Charcoal Briquette Mix
2. Material Density: 30 Lbs. per Cubic Foot
3. Conveyor System Capacity: 100 Cubic feet per Hour
4. Duty: 24 Hours per Day

KWS Advantages

Royal Oak contracted Krech Ojard & Associates as the engineering firm to oversee the design of the new equipment and plant layout. The KWS and Krech Ojard engineering teams collaborated to ensure the bucket elevator would fit within the constraints of the existing plant layout. KWS provided an Autodesk Inventor 3D model during the design review process to check for layout and interference issues. Together, we were able to make any minor adjustments to the bucket elevators’ discharge height, discharge chute length, and bracing locations to ensure downtime of the plant would be minimized during the installation.

KWS Special Features

KWS provided a heavy-duty centrifugal-type bucket elevator. Chain-type bucket elevators have traditionally been used in coal handling applications because of their robust low-maintenance design. The KWS chain-type bucket elevator includes a heavy-duty, steel-bushed chain. These chains are designed to provide superior performance in the most severe working conditions. High strength, hardened pins, bushings, and sidebars offer excellent wear resistance, great fatigue resistance, and reduced chain elongation. The bucket elevator included heavy-duty engineering class sprockets utilizing Type C single, non-split hubs keyed with set screws to match the head and tail shaft’s diameter. The sprockets were provided with flame-hardened teeth providing superior wear resistance.

To aid in the mitigation of dust at the discharge of the bucket elevator, KWS incorporated a dust collection nozzle as an integral part of the split cap. The spout is fitted with a flange matching the ANSI 150 lb. pattern for a seamless connection to Royal Oak’s dust collection system.

As part of the KWS standard design, KWS provided an adjustable screw type take-up. The take-up frames include externally mounted split packing gland seals to prevent material from leaking through the boot shaft penetrations. These frames also include integrated platforms which provide space between the packing gland seals and the pillow block bearings to prevent bearing contamination.