Feature
Flour mill design
holes in the floors, in the right places to accommodate spouting and pneumatics and other pieces of plant that require access through the floors. It is easier to accommodate changes in steel buildings than in concrete but it is also easier to inadvertently weaken the building structure by making too many structural changes in a steel building after the building has been erected. A simple layout of a milling facility would be to have the intake and wheat silos at one end, close to the water and the supply vessels followed by the main mill building housing the wheat cleaning plant and then the mill. Flour and bran will normally be blown into finished product silos at the opposite end of the mill building to the wheat silos and these will, likely as not feed through packing machines into the main storage warehouses. All this arrangement will ideally be in a straight line to avoid using unnecessary power transferring products from one point to another when gravity can do the job far cheaper.
Other items, such as offices, maintenance workshops, staff welfare facilities and laboratories will need to be allowed for and apart from them being near to the mill there is nothing to be gained by having them in any particular places, suffice to say that the wheat laboratory may well be close to the intake point and the flour laboratory close to the packers. I am obviously referring to a mill where bagged flour is the prime product but I realize that there are more and more mills being built with bulk facilities and several are also being built in certain developing countries with plant bakeries very close by, if they are not built as an integral part of the whole facility. Certainly this is the case within pasta plants and semolina mills invariably being built side by side to obtain the greatest economies overall. Economies on maintenance, quality control, staff welfare and general administration can all be maximized by incorporating as many operations as is feasible and practical on the one site.
Grain cooling
Traffic flow and layout Several sites I have worked on over the years have adopted traffic flow as the main criteria for their premises layout. With one incoming weighbridge and one outgoing weighbridge, a circular route for vehicles around the perimeter of the site often proves to be an economical layout with minimum supervision of vehicles. Cameras and traffic notice boards serve to control traffic very well and also provide a good record of vehicle turn round time and precise data as to when vehicles arrived and departed. The mill building itself is usually designed by the milling engineers and is then checked over by local structural engineers who may or may not be retained until the building is complete and machinery is installed. Use of contract managers is invaluable if you have nobody on staff who has carried out major works before, either civil or mechanical.
Attention to detail Electrical controls are usually supplied by milling engineers as well but transformers,
Silo Construction & Engineering
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