For Concrete Production Speed and Accuracy, the process of weighing up and discharging materials is the heart of any plant production.  Concrete Batch Plants require production speed while remaining highly repetitive and accurate in order to produce quality concrete.  Recent advancements in load cell technology has cut seconds out of production time to produce high strength concrete. 

Concrete Batch Plants are basically weighing devices utilizing a scale system that is sized appropriately for the Aggregate, Cement, and Water materials.  Originally Batch Plant Weigh Batchers incorporated an analog system of lever arms, stilyard rods and pivot points to display accurate batch weights on an analog dial head.  In the early 1980’s single “S” type load cells replaced the dial heads, and finally in the early 2000’s multiple “S” type load cells replaced the lever arms.  A load cell is basically a soft metal that when a force is applied the Protons move in one direction, while the electrons move in the opposite direction creating a millivolt.  Up until this point weigh batchers still needed a scale settle time of 3-4 seconds to allow the weighing forces to dissipate for each material being weighed up.

Today, Compression Load Cells are being applied to the corners of the plant weigh batchers and eliminate any force or movement of the scale.  The scale settle time can typically be reduced down to 2 seconds saving several seconds on each weigh up and discharge of materials.  Compression Load Cells also increase the accuracy or scale divisions increasing the quality of plant production.

A structurally well designed and engineered batch plant will provide linear batching regardless of the batch size, and should be able to batch materials with 0 to 1 job bites.  Typically a plant jog is 2-5 seconds depending on the scale system technology being applied; i.e. Lever Arms Vs. Load Cells. By reducing the number of jogs from 5 to 1, could save up to 25 seconds per material weigh up.

Automatic Concrete Batch Controls have algorithms that can adapt to the unique concrete plant materials, and anticipate when a gate should be closed in order hit its target weight.  To get started, a general rule of thumb is 2lbs. / Sq In / Sec for Cement, Aggregate, and Water.