Plastic pellet heating methods
Plastic pellet heating methods
(OP)
I need to think of some "outside the box" heating methods for a column of plastic pellets. Currently hot air is blown through the pellets to heat them. Another way is to run them under an IR heater. Can anybdy think of some alternate ways? Some sort of radiaion, like microwave? Help! Thanks a lot in advance.





RE: Plastic pellet heating methods
We heat tons of pellets by by tumbling in twin cone dryers. The dryers have 6" tubes that are heated by oil. After the pellets are heated for a period of time they a cooled as the hot oil changed to cold oil.
We tried several microwave heaters, but for our purpose they were not successful.
RE: Plastic pellet heating methods
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Could you give us a clue why the hot air flow is not satisfactory?
Mike Halloran
Pembroke Pines, FL, USA
RE: Plastic pellet heating methods
Airflow is not ideal because if the pellets are dusty as they usually are, the dust separates out and clogs screens, air filters...it fouls everything. Also, the largest ring compressor blower that is "affordable" is about 800 CFM, not enough to do much more than 750 lbs/.hour of material, and we need to go as high as 2500 lbs./hour.
RE: Plastic pellet heating methods
The grid system that we used wouldn't get your desired capacity.
Here is another system that we used for drying plastic pellets on your scale and larger.
http://www.witte.com/plastics.shtml
There is another system with a smaller footprint we did use for large volumes of pellets which I'm trying to get a name for. All I can remember was it was made in Edmonton Alberta. This system was used for SSP of Nylon.