Tuesday, July 17, 2012

BY-PRODUCTS PLANT - Part 29

With my new found elbow room for my by-products plant I'm able to add a few more structures, namely a Benzol plant and also, the subject of this post, an Ammonium Sulfate storage building.  I found a photo of an unique building serving this purpose on the HAER site and set about to build a very compressed version of it.  I'm not sure of the name of the coke works, but will include this information in a future post.  It is in Alabama and isn't Thomas Coke.  It has some interesting features that include a coal bunker filled directly by railcars via a very elevated spur.  Also, the quench tower is perpendicular to the oven battery and the associated quench car track follows a 180 degree curve.   I started with the actual storage building - there is also a tower to elevate the product and a connecting horizontal conveyor.
Building the Core
This building sort of looks like a Mayan pyramid or something, but allows for bulk storage of the ammonium sulfate by-product.  The base is .060 styrene and the internal formers are .040 sheet styrene.  The structure is sheathed in .040 styrene with a JTT corrugated metal plastic sheet glued on the large roof.  The concrete buttresses are made from .040 sheet and .020 strip.

Corrugated material on one side so far.  Corrugations are a little heavier than scale but will probably look fine once it's all built


2 comments:

John Teichmoeller said...

Jim, the fascinating coke works in Alabama you speak of is probably Empire Coke, Holt Alabama, photodocumented by HAER. We had the privelige of visiting it with the SIA meet in Birmingham in, I think, 1997, but by the time we had our SIG meet in Birmingham in 2000 it had been closed. I am basing my small byproducts plant on many of the features of Empire, too. Remember standing inside that ammonium sulphate building. Cleaned out the nostrils!
John Teichmoeller

Jim Musser said...

Hi John - Yes, you are right about it being Empire Coke. I'd looked at a few from Alabama and just forgot which one when blogging about it. Sounds like a great SIA tour, wish I had been there.

Jim