The hard stuff or the solid bitumen: Industry strangle point

The backbone of modern road building is bitumen which forms the backbone of asphalt; the basic binder that gives it its strength and durability. Nevertheless, its inorganic form, a high viscosity semi straight solid substance poses great logistical and operational problems when loaded into conventional steel barrels. Decades of inefficient conversion of this solid bitumen into the liquid form needed to make asphalt mixing has been practiced inefficiently, with many people using crude methods of heating resulting in a lack of uniform temperatures, high use of fuel and large quantities of residual products left in the drums.

This is the place where the specialized barrels bitumen melting machine, also known as bitumen drum decanter comes out as the necessary evil in a fast growing global market of bitumen.

New product – the Barrels Bitumen Melting Machine

The barrels bitumen melting machine is a special type of industrial equipment that is specifically designed to address the natural challenges with barrel-packed bitumen. It is a very specialized melting system, which is highly efficient in terms of thermal efficiency, safety and speed of operation.

The machines used, in contrast to the older methods that could require direct flame contact or lacked the ability to control heating, should include a sophisticated indirect heating system, most often a thermal oil heater. This heat oil is pumped around coils in a closed melting chamber into which the bitumen barrels are loaded. The outcome is a regulated, even heating process which avoids direct contact between the flame and the bitumen, and as such, prevents excessive heating, degradation, or coking.

The working of a Bitumen Drum Decanter

A high-end bitumen decanter is powered by a simplistic multi-stage process:

1. Automated Loading:

Barrels, with their lids in most cases removed, are loaded upon a rail system, commonly by hydraulic pushers or gantry cranes, and this greatly minimizes the amount of manual labor and potential safety hazard of traditional handling.

2. Decanting Chamber:

The barrels are forced to the very insulated heating chamber. The thermal oil coils or the hot air circulation systems are started indoors and initiate the controlled melting process.

3. Indirect, Uniform Melting:

The solid bitumen is melted on the outside-in by the indirect heat. When the bitumen is liquefied it drips or decants out of the barrel and into a lower heated collection pool or storage tank. The constant temperature is used to maintain the bitumen at the recommended viscosity (usually 140-160deg) to be transferred to the asphalt mixing plant.

4. Absolute Removal and Minimum Waste:

The second major benefit of modern decanters is that they can virtually remove all the bitumen in the barrel. Dynamic designs will make sure that all the left bitumen is melted and the amount of waste material will be reduced significantly and clean up will require less money and less pollution to the environment by discarded drums.

5. Continuous Supply:

Once melted a dedicated bitumen transfer pump directs the molten bitumen through heated pipelines into the main storage tanks or directly to the asphalt plant, which is an important factor in large-scale, high-output production projects.