Document 70m7KX21xRDNkZZRkD0eQnQV8

A 372 it' American Ceramic Society Bulletin l; v- m . nil Brick made at the new Baltimore basic refractories plent of Harbison-Walker Co., ere unloaded by fork-lift trucks from tunne kiln cars in the storage building. HARBISON-WALKER'S NEW BALTIMORE PLANT The new basic refractories works completed last Novem ber at Baltimore, Md,, by the Harbison-Walker Refrac tories Co., was built with the objective of making it the most efficient plant of its kind in operation. The company's own construction department built the plant, incorporating in it ideas' gained from experi ence at Harbison-Walker's two other basic refractories plants, and several other refractories works of vari ous kinds operated by the company. The plant turns out several kinds of refractory products from blends of chrome ore and magnesite, and from the company's exclusive forsterite (2MgO. SiO) refractories, which A. M. Tvergaard are made from olivine. These are sold as brick, ramming raises and-castables, and metal-cased brick. : Superintendent of the Baltimore plant is Aage M. 'Tvergaard, who came to Baltimore from the Cape May plant of Northwest Magnesite Co., a partly owned sub sidiary of Harbison-Walker. Mr. Tvergaard was born in Denmark in 1908, and first came to this country in 1930 while employed by the F. L. Smidth Co., of Denmark. He has been in the cement and refractory materials fields con tinuously since then. The new District Superintendent for the Baltimore and Chester, Pa., plants of Harbison-Walker s Thomas W. Lloyd, who has been Superintendent at Chester since 1941. He is a native of Portsmouth, Ohio, and has worked for Harbison-Walker in several plants since joining the com pany in 1929. Mr. Lloyd had attended The Ohio State University for two years before that time, .- and in the fall of 1937 he obtained a leave of absence to continue his education, in 1939 he was graduated from Ohio State with a degree of Bachelor of In dustrial Engineering, and returned immediately to Harbison-Walker. This plant is character- bed by the almost com plete mechanization of handling and transporting operations. All ore is de livered in hopper-bottom Thomas W. Lloyd cars and unloaded, by means of a car-shaker, if needed, onto an apron feeder which provides a steady flow of material into the crushers, located underground. It is then moved on belt conveyor? to floor compartments in the raw materials storage build ing. ' There, the ore is loaded onto more belt conveyors by ;scoop trucks and carried to the grinding department, where it is ground and screened. It is separated into different grain sizes and returned to bins, each of which holds a specified kind of ore ground to a prescribed size. Some of the ore is reduced to powder In ball mills, in order to provide ' Vol. 27, No. 10 J Harbison-Walker's New Baltimore Plant 373 all the gTain sizes needed for proper batching. The feed to all grinding equipment is electrically and electronically controlled, insuring uniformity in operation. F*iOjn the first storage until the final batching operation, the tfiree raw materials used in the plant are completely segregated. They pass through separate grinders, screens, and ball mills, and travel over three separate conveyor systems. There are dust collecting systems which remove dust from each operation and return it to the proper bin. This is both a health and cleanliness measure, and a means of avoiding material contamination. The complete separation of materials eliminates the possibility of contamination which occurs when unlike materials are processed by the same equipment, and makes possible exact batch composition control. Gates at the bottom of the bins holding ground materials open into a batching or "larry" car which moves on rails beneath the openings of some 100 bins. In making up a brick batch, the car may make as many as twelve or more stops, collecting different materials in various grain sizes. The larry car takes the batch to the mixers, from which the mix is automatically fed to the brick presses, or to the sacking or canning departments in the case of materials to be shipped in bags or drums. The pressed brick are placed by the operators on metal pallets, which are then handled by fork lift trucks. The brick are handled only twice as units in the entire course of manufacture and ship ment, unless palletized shipments are required, in which case they are removed from the metal pallets and placed on wooden pallets before shipping. About half the brick produced are chemically bonded. Conveyor belts like the one above, move most of the materials used in the new plant This one runs from the primary to the secondary crusher at the plant The rest are fired in the plant's Swindell-Dressler tunnel kiln. This kiln is 324 ft. long and operates at very high temperatures. It is oil fired, and constructed of var ious types of Harbison-Walker refractory brick, making possible a comparison by the company of the performance of some of its own products. Supplementing the close control of quality made possible by the high degree of mechanization are regular laboratory tests made on materials at each stage of manufacture. The plant includes a completely equipped laboratory, and addi tional tests are runat thecompaoy'scentral research labora tory at Hays, Pittsburgh, Pa. For an account of the beginnings of the Harbison-Walker Co., and the life of Samuel P. Harbison, see the June. 1941, Bulletin, pp. 210-13 At all raw materials arc crushed upon arrival at the plant, no uncrushed ores are stored. The above photo shows com partments holding crushed ere in the raw materials storage building. A car of fired chrome brick is pulled from the tunnel kiln et the plant l i