pneumatic Offload questions Sand/salt

We haul most cement, ammonium nitrate and lime but we occasionally haul salt and sand.
The time for your salt unload, given the twists and turns in the plumbing, doesn't seem unreasonable. By your own words, the offload went well with no plugging.
Being a new driver, why not just follow your trainer's example and see how things work out?
After you've been there awhile and hauled more of those loads and talked to other drivers you'll have a better idea of how or if you can shorten your unload times,
Same thing with the sand.

PS...on the salt. If you ever plug up a load of salt, especially rock salt, you'll remember the experience for a long time. I know that for a fact.

 

Ive done a couple loads of sand a few years ago but I don’t remember using the aerators for it. The top air and mainline’s where wide open and then maintained the pressure with adjusting product valve.

 

i would not consider either of these unreasonable.

the second delivery, well, i will say that when unloading sand, you will be blowing mostly air. i had an occasional bottom ash delivery up into the three boilers at a power plant. it is basically sand. the piping "runs" are as you described. 90 degree turns, hundreds of feet straight up into the belly of the beast. on boiler B, i could not run past 5 or 6 psi without drastically increasing the chance of getting stopped up. one boiler took 2.5 hours to unload into. one boiler took 4 hours to unload into. one boiler took 6 to 8 hours to unload into, and you had to elevate sections of your piping so that it was in kind of a wave pattern.

the thing to do is.. when you get out on your own, try it your way. see what happens, how fast the tank empties. mark it down. if you are somewhat of an expert in pumping and can always reverse pump and unstop your line, whats the harm in experimenting? you lose some time and gain some knowledge.

 

8lbs or you will be here all day....under 8 you will plug and over 8 you may be fighting storage tank vents clogged with corrosion from the salt -or- crystallization of the salt built up inside the vent so over 8 lbs you are pushing against back pressure...

 

I’ve never hauled sand, but we had many salt places that were in the 2-3 hour range because of how they were set up.

 

think about it, with liquids every 90 degree turn cuts the speed in half.....flowables are solids acting like liquids

 

And salt wants to lay on the bottom of the pipe on any flat sections.

 

We haul rock salt. Depending on the moisture content it can plug up in a heart beat. The worst we had was a load that sat in the trailer over a humid weekend and it turned into basically a 50000 lb lump. We ran the vibrators and beat the crap out of the trailer with rubber mallets for the whole unload. We also shut down every half hour or so, depressurized, and poked lengths of rebar into the load to break it up. Took about five hours on a load that usually took two and wore three men right down to a nub. Luckily it had a short hose run with only one 45 degree bend.
Now, if we can't unload it the same day we pick it up we don't mess with it.
Does granular salt do the same thing? Does it plug easy?

 

I never had issues like that with either rock or granular salt. And we rarely delivered same day and many times sat over the weekend with it on the truck. My longest run was KS to Lemoore CA and it unloaded like normal.