Coke Baking 101
grande man said:
Awesome work, Ken. Can't wait to see them on the layout.
jbaakko said:
As Grandeman says, AWSOME! Can't wait until they're in place so I have a better understanding of what all goes on!
Steve B said:
SpaceMouse said:
I want to see it in context as well. Can't wait.
Well
shucks
... since you guys asked so nicely, ...
The
first image, you'll probably recognize from the Blog - an 'arial' view of the whole coke complex. Starting from the lower left, coal travels up a conveyor from the rotary dumper to the receiving bunker/crusher. From the bottom of the crusher building, the prepared coal travels up a second conveyor [left to right] to the charging bunker. From there, it is loaded into a 'larry' car [don't ask me
why they call it that...?
] which rolls on tracks above the battery of ovens. Three chutes on the bottom of the larry car correspond to the three charging holes at the top of each oven. The coal bakes in the oven for several hours, while the tar and other impurities are leached out and reclaimed for by-products [not enough space to model
that].
In
image #2, we have a view of the rear side of the oven battery with the pusher machine. If you look closely, you can see a rusty-looking arm with a flared end facing the ovens - that thing pushes the entire ovenload of finished coke out of the oven and into a 'quench' car waiting on the other side [haven't found time to model that one yet...]. Directly over the top of the push ram is the
leveling bar which, as its name implies, levels-out the coal dumped into the oven to ensure that it will bake evenly.
Image #3 is another shot of the pusher at a different angle.
Referring back to
image #1 for a moment, you can see the track where the quench car travels immediately beside the oven battery. After receiving a load of 2400degF coke, it chugs over to the rectangular-shaped concrete structure at the left. Here, the white-hot coke is sprayed with thousands of gallons of water to cool it (
now you see how the quench car got its name
) - this generates a spectacular cloud of steam which is visible for miles in all directions. The quench car then takes its still-steaming load of coke back to a receiving hopper known as the
coke wharf (toward the right, behind the dirty-red metal fencing). From here the coke travels up a third conveyor to the blast furnace highline bunker (red structure at the far right). The coke is loaded from here into the blast furnace charging car [not yet modeled].
Image #4 is just another view of the 'push' side of the oven battery.
