Silo

Silos are commonly used for bulk storage of grain, coal, cement, carbon black, woodchips, food products and sawdust.

An advantage of tower silos is that the silage tends to pack well due to its own weight, except in the top few feet.

In bumper crop times, the excess grain is stored in piles without silos or bins, causing considerable losses.

Concrete stave silos are built from common components designed for high strength and long life.

Low-oxygen silos are only opened directly to the atmosphere during the initial forage loading, and even the unloader chute is sealed against air infiltration.

Bag silos are heavy plastic tubes, usually around 8 to 12 ft (2.4 to 3.6 m) in diameter, and of variable length as required for the amount of material to be stored.

Due to the dry nature of the stored material, it tends to be lighter than silage and can be more easily handled by under-floor grain unloaders.

Sand and salt for winter road maintenance are stored in conical dome-shaped (clear truss roof) silos.

[3] The dome is made of prefabricated wood panels with shingles installed on a circular reinforced concrete base.

The silos are light weight and make for great small scale storage for farmers with livestock and grain operations.

The light weight design and cost effective materials make plastic silos a great alternative to traditional steel bins.

Manufactured from trevira tissue, a tough non-toxic fabric, the silos can handle particle size down to 2 microns and can be pneumatically loaded without the need for a dust collector.

In Malta a relatively large stock of wheat was preserved in some hundreds of pits (silos) cut in the rock.

The harvester contains a drum-shaped series of cutting knives which shear the fibrous plant material into small pieces no more than an inch long, to facilitate mechanized blowing and transport via augers.

The finely chopped plant material is then blown by the harvester into a forage wagon which contains an automatic unloading system.

Tower forage filling is typically performed with a silo blower which is a very large fan with paddle-shaped blades.

A large slow-moving conveyor chain underneath the silage in the forage wagon moves the pile towards the front, where rows of rotating teeth break up the pile and drop it onto a high-speed transverse conveyor that pours the silage out the side of the wagon into the blower hopper.

The loader uses an array of rotating cam-shaped spiraled teeth associated with a large comb-shaped tines to push forage into the bag.

Before filling begins, the entire bag is placed onto the loader as a bunched-up tube folded back on itself in many layers to form a thick pile of plastic.

Removal of the bag loader can be hazardous to bystanders since the pressure must be released and the rear end allowed to collapse onto the ground.

Computer automation and a conveyor running the length of a feeding stall can permit the silage to be automatically dropped from above to each animal, with the amount dispensed customized for each location.

The farmer must continually move around in this highly hazardous environment of spinning shafts and high-speed conveyors to check material flows and adjust speeds, and to start and stop all the equipment between loads.

This job requires that the farmer work directly underneath a machine weighing several tons suspended fifty feet or more overhead from a small steel cable.

The fermentation of the silage produces methane gas which over time will outgas and displace the oxygen in the top of the silo.

A farmer directly entering a silo without any other precautions can be asphyxiated by the methane, knocked unconscious, and silently suffocate to death before anyone else knows what has happened.

Grains handling company GrainCorp, which had supported 14 silo art projects, opposed the move, saying that the term should not "be owned by anyone, but [be] freely used by the community".

[21] The town of Monto in the North Burnett Region of Queensland has been put on the tourism map as the most northerly silo art installation in Australia.

Its "Three Moons" silos depict several stories of the past, including the era of gold mining, cattle mustering and The Dreaming.

Free movement of stored materials, on a first-in, first-out basis, is essential in maximizing silo efficiency.

In cases of bridging, an additional danger exists as the exit hole needs to be rodded from underneath, exposing the worker to falling powder.