hopper chemical storage bulk storage HOPPER One of the immediate concerns was to get the silo emptied and to determine the cause of the deformations and the crack so that a new hopper, with thicker walls if necessary, could be commissioned. n closer examination it was found that powder was leaking from a crack in the hopper. The hopper sections of both silos were slightly deformed but the one that was leaking was worse than the other. Although the stainless steel walls of the hopper were steep enough for mass flow, other factors were causing the powder to flow in funnel flow. As a result of our analysis we were able to confirm that replacing the damaged hopper section with one based on the same structural design would be adequate. The hopper silo with a capacity of 25 tons of steel grit. Hopper bottom bins/silos can store any flowable commodity from feed, seed and plastic pellets to certain mineral supplements. As forage is unloaded from the wagon into the silo blower hopper, it is moved by auger or conveyor to the blower fan which forces it into the silo. Associated with each silo is a local weigh hopper for accurately dispensing ingredients up to 25Kg, plus a means of bulk feeding product directly to conveying lines for rapid transfer and weighing at the mixer weigh hoppers. Alternatively it can slow feed in reverse to top up the buffer hopper and feeder. Optionally existing silos can be retrofitted with the hopper. Extracted cement dust can then be conveyed to the weighing hopper at ground level. The stresses acting in a hopper are different from those in the vertical section. When flowing downwards in the hopper, the bulk solid is compressed in the horizontal direction so that the walls of the hopper carry a larger part of the weight of the bulk solid and, hence, the vertical stress in the lower part of the hopper is clearly smaller than after filling.