How to Ensure Safety of Steel Silo?

With the technological change and improvement, we can find the steel silos are widely used in many field. We must know it that steel silos are used for material storage, but after long time’s using, it may cause safety problem. So we should understand the safety technology of steel silo and methods of avoiding collapse and explosion. 

1. Shipping department is responsible for silo cleaning. The mechanical & electrical work team is responsible for water leakage and repair of the silo specifically. 

2. Construction workers must be required to wear the PPE before entering the construction site. Labor supplies, safety belts, safety ropes and other construction team must be approved by the safety manager in charge of safety check before use.

3. Construction team should carefully check the safety situation of the site before the construction. After the side door is opened, first please send experienced personnel to check the inside silo and water leakage.

4. For silo lighting system, generally 12V safety lamp shall be used at proper. The cable and joint cannot be broken and their disassembly should be checked by expertise electricians before use.

5. When cleaning the silo wall, we should do as the sequences from top to bottom. According to the site, we can select the suitable tools for work and cannot use sharp tools to clean up the bottom of the silo to prevent damage to inflatable box.

6. When dealing with water leakage, spider workers shall tight two safety belts with double protection to play a role in lifting spider workers. Two safety belts must be approved by the construction unit that is responsible for the safety checking before use. 

7. Two workers shall be left outside the silo to guard the belts. The guardian of the construction shall in time observe the dynamic situation of the silo and timely remind the workers of the bad situation so as to help the inside workers stay out in a timely manner when something may fall into the danger.

8. The shipping department shall timely put the material from the dredging under the mouth, control the unloading flow. According to the specified position, we should make the surrounding protective measures.  

9. After the cleaning of the entire silo area, the silo and the site should be cleaned, the shipping department to send someone to check and handle it. 

10. During the period of construction, the construction unit must have the leadership to always make the inspection of the abnormal situations and the other problems that are encountered. The shipping department is responsible for all workers to control and resolve.  

11. The construction workers must put safety in the first place, be attentive and be careful in the operation, following the on-site command by the expert with no frolicking on the site.  

For steel silo, especially the large steel silo, the collapse and explosion are the serious technical problem. The explosion is mainly caused by design defects of mechanical structure or construction quality. The base of the silo is mainly formed by the imbalance, which may lead to tilt and then collapse down. The explosion is mainly caused by the break of the local structure design limits of capacity of the contents of the silo wall. We can conclude that it is caused by basic foundation. 

1. The designers should master the detailed understanding of the characteristics of the material stored in the silo and strictly control design parameters to ensure the actual sufficient strength of the use. The designers will not rely on the psychological luck, leaving potential huge security risks to the clients. 

2. The designers shall fully consider the influence of environmental temperature. For the steel silo used under low temperature environment, the structural design must be considered the effect of expansion contraction of the structure, and then reasonable design is made. If the silo is with sufficient enough strength, low temperature impact on the destructive force of structure can be eliminated, and its structure can be also used in safety. For example, in the cold area most of steel silo is constructed by ordinary Q235B steel in the past. Though the steel silo will not damage by the cold, of course, if the temperature is lower, the safety of steel silo will not be guaranteed. If the cold steel plate is adopted, shrinkage coefficient is less than the ordinary steel plate under the condition of low temperature, though in the structure of defects, the force of the silo will increase little and then the destruction of the force is much smaller. At the same time, in the range of low temperature steel plate does not appear brittle phenomenon in use, and the possibility of structural damage is greatly reduced. Thus the Q345 series of low temperature steel plate can provide both high safe and low cost favorably. 

3. Although the steel silo can be completed in construction at a fast speed, the construction management must be in pace with it. The construction unit must be fully prepared in advance. For construction, they must implement according to the normal speed to ensure quality. They must have reliable technical capability and experience. They can’t lower the quality to save investment, which will result in the decline in the quality of engineering.

4. In the process of using steel silo, the clients cannot arbitrarily increase the load on the silo body. For example, arbitrarily increase the equipments in the silo roof or corridor, add the load on the corridor, lift loading capacity (mostly due to the volume design is sufficient, but rich the strength lacks), add the load on the silo side, open holes on the silo body freely, etc. Here is a bad case. A designed 40,000 ton of steel silo is overloaded, reaching 60,000 tons, so the collapse accident has happened on it. The above practices will increase the risk of accidents, we should be alerted.