Fully Automatic Big Bag Filling Station for Cristobalite

4 March 2021

Packaging & Bagging

The customer – SIBELCO

SIBELCO is a global material solutions company. As a diversified industrial minerals group, SIBELCO sources and transforms a wide range of minerals and is a leader in glass recycling. These include, for instance, silica sand, feldspathic minerals, olivine and clays. With over 114 production sites in more than 30 countries, SIBELCO employs more than 5,300 people worldwide.

Cristobalite – the material to be filled

Cristobalite is a high-temperature modification of quartz and occurs only very rarely in nature. For this reason, cristobalite is produced synthetically for industrial purposes from pure quartz in a rotary kiln at approx. 1500 °C. The main applications of cristobalite are dispersion-bound exterior paints and plasters, dental impression compounds, artificial marble, or countertops.

The fully automatic filling station

In Dessel, Belgium, SIBELCO operates the fully automatic filling station for cristobalite – designed and installed by the plant manufacturer EMDE within a short period of time. Thanks to the powerful weighing and control technology, up to 40 big bags can be filled per hour. Each big bag has a net weight of 1200 kg. To ensure the legal trade requirements of the filled bags, the W&M-approved SysTec weighing indicators are used. EMDE has been installing SysTec‘s innovative weighing systems and controllers on demanding filling lines for many years. To optimize the performance of the filling station, a weighed hopper was installed above the filling station to discharge the cristobalite into the big bag. This allows simultaneous filling of the container above during the big bag handling times.

At a glance: weighing terminal IT8000E

• Ease of operation: simple operator prompting, bright TFT color display 5.7“ with wide viewing angle and large weight display, alphanumeric keypad
• W&M approved as non-automatic or automatic scale (approved in the EU, USA, Canada, and others)
• Universal use: a wide range of standard programs for a variety of weighing applications
• Customer-specific modifications: Freely programmable
• Robust: stainless steel housing (ingress protection IT8000E: IP69K)
• Hazardous area: for installations in hazardous area zone 2/22 the IT8000E Ex2/22 version is available, and for zones 1/21 the IT8000Ex unit
• Various designs: for wall-mount/desk-top and panel-mount installation
• Variety of interface options: 2 internal and up to 6 external scale interfaces, connection for PC networks and WLAN, label and network printers, PLC connection via fieldbus
• High operational security: power-fail safe storage of data, password protection, battery-backed realtime clock, remote diagnosis possible over internet

“The W&M approved SysTec weighing terminal was easy to para­meterize. I especially appreciate that the entire filling process is shown very clearly on the graphic display. This makes weighing technology fun!“

Daniel Schaab, Software Engineering, EMDE

This article is published by

SysTec Systemtechnik und Industrieautomation GmbH

Since 1994 SysTec has been developing and producing W&M approved industrial weighing indicators and batching controllers for static and dynamic scales. More than 150,000 installations are successfully in use worldwide. The innovative SysTec weighing systems work reliably in numerous applications: These include filling systems for liquids and bulk ...

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