Rapid drying of clay roofing tiles in roller dryers
Creaton-Etex’ new clay roofing tile plant in Koscian (Poland) has an annual output of 30 mill. roofing tiles and 2.4 mill. accessories. Sacmi has supplied the complete drying section: dryers, handling equipment, RAT units and dry tile unloading systems. To handle the immense production volume, Sacmi has installed two roller dryers, each with the following characteristics:
› length: 78.9 m
› channel width: 3 810 mm
› no. of channels: 6
› trays: 3 660 mm x 565 mm (9 trays)
› drying cycle: 220 mm
› max. temperature: 120° C
The dryers dry the products in less than four hours to a residual moisture of less than 2%. They demonstrate outstanding output flexibility, for instance the dryers can be stopped during production. With gas and electricity consumption levels on a par with those in standard tunnel dryers thanks to high-efficiency internal recovery, rapid drying offers numerous advantages:
› lower investment cost
› no foundation cost
› less space needed
› rapid installation time (dryer completely prefabricated)
› maximum flexibility
› ultra-fast identification of any production defects
The accessories drying consists of a fully automatic plant (including automatic modification of the movable tray section) that uses eight high-volume drying chambers (working height 5 630 mm, width 3 400 mm) and four small drying chambers for small lots.
