Broken Cement Bag Detector

Cement Plant Monitoring Equipment

This article is focused mainly on cement plants and Cement Bags. There are already many kinds of sensors available for environmental monitoring which tell us the particle levels in the air e.g PM 2.5 and PM 10 and these readily available low-cost sensors are not being discussed here. This is why we have to make it plain to the reader that we are NOT discussing the need for this standard type of environmental sensors but are discussing the need for DUST sensors, especially in places where Cement is either manufactured or stored.

What is a broken cement bag detectors?

Sometimes a picture is worth more than a thousand words and maybe a video might be worth more than ten thousand words. The video will make it clear that we are talking about broken cement bags

When a cement bag is broken like this because of mishandling or irresponsible workers, the dust created is quite considerable. This dust quickly permeates through a factory or a confined area and without proper sensors that will alarm a factory owner or manager when this has occurred (so that production is halted and personnel can vacate the area) the problem is unchecked.

What kind of sensors will work with broken bag detection like this?

Most sensors are going to fail, simply because general types of sensors used to measure particles e.g. optical types cannot measure above a certain threshold due the fact that their sensitivity range is designed to measure much lower values. The sudden increase in cement dust in the air is too much for those types of sensors. In addition, optical type sensor needs to be kept clean because the lenses used are going to send false readings to the electronics when they get dirty.

Why use A Triboelectric Type sensor to measure dust from broken cement bags?

Due to the fact that the sensor is measuring electrical parameters, the sensor itself only needs to be made up of a metal rod structures. An event (such as someone dropping a cement bag) is very easily picked up within seconds. Yes, we are detecting an EVENT, and the event is the presence of cement dust in the air. Since the sensor is very robust and not damaged like an optical type sensor, the maintenance can be as simple as taking a cloth and wiping the dust off the rod.