Design and Fabrication of a Sawdust Screw Conveyor for a Steam Boiler Power Plant

Abstract

Materials are required to be conveyed to the combustor for combustion so that heat can be released to convert the water to steam for propelling the turbines. As manual feeding of the material into the combustor may be to non-uniform distribution of combustor performance, hence, this study designed and fabricated a simple sawdust screw conveyor with the sole aim material conveyance into the combustor for combustion. The conveyor was fabricated using local materials considering the design and functional requirements of the sawdust screw conveyor The conveyor is powered by an 5Hp electric motor and blower through a direct shaft drive. The produced machine was tested using sawdust and the screw conveyor gave a screw linear velocity of 1.99 m/s and a volumetric capacity of 0.00004m3 /min. the machine gave a combined blade and nozzle efficiency of 57