The Mechanical Handling and Storing of Material

THE HANDLING OF HOT COKE IN GASWORKS 153 be kept in contact with the steam for as long a time as possible, to ensure its being thoroughly quenched. This arrangement has the advantage of keeping the steam away from the retort house, the covered-in portion acting as a chimney and drawing the steam to the upper end. The illustration (Fig. 204) shows the conveyor in elevation, and also the two sections of the portion in front of the bench and the incline. The conveyor is shown delivering into a hopper with a screening plant underneath for extracting small coke and “breeze,” and de- livering the large coke into carts or wagons. A typical coke-conveying installation at the gasworks, Basle, Switzerland, in which the De Brouwer conveyor has been used, is shown in Fig. 205. The installation was built by the Berlin Anhaitische Maschinenbau Aktien-Gesell- schaft, and is shown here to illustrate the steep Fig. 206. Cross Section of Trough and Chain of Early Form. incline at which some of these conveyors are worked, and also to show that the coke can by this arrangement be thrown off the conveyor at any desired point. There are five points at which the coke can be thrown off either to railway trucks or into carts, or into a series of silos, or it may be fed on to a reciprocating conveyor which PLAN. Fig. 207. Merz Modification of De Brouwer Conveyor. grades the coke into different sizes. The De Brouwer conveyors are shown both in plan and elevation. Those marked and /j> discharge their load into the inclined con- veyor/3, which ascends at an angle of nearly 30°. The exit tx is for withdrawing the coke with- out classification, and the exit /2 serves the pur- pose of withdrawing the coke which has been produced during the working of the nightshift, and storing it on the ground in a heap. This method has the advantage that the night coke can thus be stored, obviating the necessity of running the machinery in the coke store during the night. The coke thus accumulated is lifted in the morning by the elevator I to the coke breaker /z, and is then classified by a reciprocat- ing screen i into different sizes and deposited into hoppers and z/3. The coke with- drawn during the daytime is run to the terminal of the conveyor f^, and is thence spouted to the coke-breaker h and duly classified. There is this advantage in storing the coke in the hoppers uv uv and zz3, that from the top hoppers elevated railways can be fed ; hoppers z/2 are high enough to discharge their contents into railway trucks ; while from z/3 the coal can be withdrawn into lower receptacles such as hand-carts, etc. The late Mr E. Merz, formerly engineer of the Cassel Gasworks, introduced some improvements in the construction of this conveyor; the bottom and sides of the trough are made double, with a lining (Fig. 206), so that if desired the interior of the troughing can readily be renewed, the changing plates being fastened by bolts. If considerations of space should render it convenient to have the return strand of the chain carried under the