As biomass pellets becoming one of the main fuels sources in people’s daily life, there have been emerging countless biomass pellets manufacturers all over the world. Some companies with sufficient fund and raw material have set up large biomass pellet plant, while others with small amount of raw material supply would prefer to establish small biomass pellet plant first and enlarge their productivity later if there is stable market demand.
Small biomass pellet plant layout
This is a typical small pellet plant layout for 500-700kg/h biomass pellets production.
From the drawing we can see, the small biomass pellet plant mainly includes:
Crushing system, conveying system, drying system, pelleting system, cooling system, bagging system.
How to choose the specific machines for your small biomass pellet plant layout?
- Crushing system: there are wood chipper and crusher (hammer mill) for crushing raw material.
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| Wood chipper | Crusher |
Wood chipper is used to cut large piece materials into small pieces. Usually if the raw material is wood chip, log, or branch, the wood chipper is a must.
The crusher is used to pulverize raw material into about 2-5mm in diameter to be suitable for pelleting. The chipped wood also need to be processed by crusher, while other biomass like straw, stalk, palm fiber, and other crop waste only need to be processed by crusher (hammer mill) instead of wood chipper.
- Drying system: most of the time biomass raw material has high moisture content, but the suitable moisture content for pelleting is 8-18%. So dryer is necessary part for pellet plant. There are air flow dryer and drum dryer. The air flow dryer is often used in small biomass pellet plant, while the drum dryer is primarily for large biomass pellet plant.
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| Dryer |
- Pelleting system: pelleting system also has 2 types of machines: flat die pellet mill and ring die pellet mill. The 200-500kg/h biomass pellet plant and mobile pellet plant (250-450kg/h) use flat die pellet mill as its main part; the 500-700kg/h pellet plant use small ring die pellet mill or flat die pellet mil; while the 700-1000kg/h plant uses ring die pellet mill.
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| Flat die pellet mill | Ring die pellet mill |
- Conveying system: this system needs conveyor and cyclone separator. There are 2 types of conveyor: belt conveyor and screw conveyor. Whether to use belt conveyor or screw conveyor depends on your raw biomass material status.
- Cooling system: this process requires a pellet cooler. Some coolers can only cool the pellets; the cooler made by GEMCO is a counter flow type, which is more efficient in cooling and can sieve the pellets at the same time (for all capacity from 200-1000kg/h).
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| Pellet cooler | Pellet packing machine |
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Bagging system: it is to pack the biomass pellets in small or large bags by a pellet packing machine.
Small biomass pellet plant has its own advantages:
2. It does not need too much space. Only tens of square meters place can be enough for the small pellet plant.
3. It does not require too many workers.
4. It is more flexible.
